Conceptual resources
Truly understanding your own work is a surprisingly uncommon phonomenon. Many organizations are just winging it, and while they’re surviving — thank goodness — they’re not exactly thriving.
Here are some resources to help you get a grip on various aspects of your work.
User Roles documentation
Your CRM and other tools probably grant varying levels of permissions to various users. Keeping all this straight inside your own head is going to be pretty hard.
Maintining an active User Permissions policy document can save you and your users a lot of headache by removing uncertainty and preventing mistakes.
When I mention this to clients, they often ask me for an example from a someone who’s done it already. Well, here it is: an example User Roles document derived from one I designed with a real-world organization who worked through this process with me.
Tools I use
I'm a big fan of managing your projects in-house, where possible. It's one of the best things you can do to grow your institutional knowledge of your systems, which is a huge value in the long term.
Everything I do for my clients, you can do yourself in-house, if you want. There are no secrets here.
Over the years, I’ve built up a collection of tools and services I love and recommend. Don’t be surprised, some of these links will get me a referral bonus, and some of them will get you a discount.
CRM
Community-driven organizations need a CRM that’s both affordable and reliable. CiviCRM has a proven track-record, a robust community of active users and contributors, no licensing fees, and a singular focus on the needs of community-driven orgs.
I’ve been implementing CiviCRM solutions for clients since 2009, and have been very pleased with the value CiviCRM continues to provide to my clients.
CiviCRM is one of Joinery's primary offerings because it provides so much that these organizations need right out of the box, without a line of custom code. And when I do need to extend CiviCRM for a client's unique needs, its robust extensibility allows me to add features that would be impossible in other systems.
Hosting services
Every site you run needs to be hosted somewhere. Each of Joinery’s client sites — and my own public-facing CRM site — runs on a separate Linode VPS. Clients get rock-sold infrastructure, and I get full server-level administrative access. Managing a hosting server is not for the inexperienced or faint-of-heart, but if you’ve got the skills in-house and are looking for a hosting platform, I’ll rave all day about Linode.
This Linode sign-up link gives you $100/60-day credit on your new Linode account.
Uptime monitoring
Sites go down. It happens. And when they do, somebody usually needs to take action (or you can just wait and see if it comes back up).
Downtime notifications can be a life-saver, and at the very least they can let you cross one more worry off your list: if you have a reliable uptime monitor, and you haven’t been notified of downtime, your site is up and running.
Each of Joinery’s client sites is monitored by UptimeRobot. If a site goes off-line for any reason, my team gets an immediate notification through the Android or iPhone app, so we can take quick action. I’ve got uptime reports at my fingertips, so I can know if we’re keeping up with our uptime guarantee.
If you’ve got a site you care about, somebody should maintain an uptime monitor on it. UptimeRobot’s free plan is enough for most people, though Joinery outgrew that some time ago.
Uptime status checking
Even if you’ve got an uptime monitor, you might experience at some point that your site is just not responding in your browser.
Maybe it's offline for real — which means there’s a problem with your site — or maybe it’s just unreachable from your local internet connection — which might just mean you need to reconnect to your local wifi.
How can you be sure which it is?
FreshPing let you type in any web address to check it's a side is really offline for everyone or just unavailable from your internet connection. (It also appears to offer some kind of paid monitoring service, but I’ll recommend you go with UptimeRobot for that.)
Got more tools?
If you’ve got a tool you love that’s not listed here, shoot me a quick email and let me know — we’re all trying to improve ourselves here!
“The most competent, professional, honest, and fair developer I've had the pleasure of working with. You've been critical to our support infrastructure. ”
— David Opheim, Webmaster, International Voices Houston