Focusing on constituents and mission

Now that we have a plan in place, we can move from how to set up the project to how to do CRM.

Many non-profits have processes and activities with certain types of constituents that are analogous to those in the marketing and sales areas of for-profit business. Two metaphors that are common in the for-profit arena have crossover value for non-profits. The first one is a sales funnel, which envisions a large number of unqualified (or semi-qualified) prospects entering at the top of the funnel in order to create a sufficient number of sales realized at the bottom. The second metaphor is the picture of a ladder of engagement, with contacts classified according to how many steps they have taken, such as revealing more information about themselves, or increasing involvement on the path toward becoming a client, donor, or volunteer.

In both these metaphors, the overarching goal is to increase commitment and involvement. You want the casual newsletter recipient to eventually become a donor; the first-time event attendee to eventually become a member. Climbing higher in the analogy, you eventually would see the constituent become so committed and engaged in the organization that they lead a committee, sit on the board, or spearhead a new initiative.

These two analogies provide ways to think through this process. For example, it's a good idea to think carefully about the value proposition —the benefits realized for each step up the ladder of engagement, both for the constituent and the organization. By analyzing metrics such as the number of contacts at each level on the mountain, you can identify possible stumbling blocks that could impede that deeper engagement.

Do you find that you have no trouble recruiting subscribers and online activists, but can't convert them into online organizers or donors? Perhaps more incentives are needed, or maybe the signup buttons need to be more prominent. Do you have success with online organizer signups, but find they are not doing much to actually fulfill that role? Perhaps the recruitment forms for organizers are too complicated, entering e-mail contacts manually is too much of a burden, or maybe the canned recruitment text that the system provides them to send to people needs to be made more compelling.

From an organizational perspective, the investment in each step needs to be commensurate with the expected return. Are you investing heavily in white papers that no one reads? Maybe you should repurpose the content of each one after it has been written into a series of newsletter articles or Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. If they are seen as highly valuable, but only to significantly interested parties, perhaps you can sell them to interested organizations or organize panel discussion events around their publication. Are you putting a lot of effort into fundraising event planning without much in the way of monetary return? Perhaps you need to shift to direct-ask fundraising, or reduce the cost of food and entertainment at your events by shifting from dinners to after-work wine-and-cheese parties.

Ideally, business processes are designed so that whenever the organization or one of its constituents initiates an interaction, the interaction is likely to be of value to both parties. For example, the newsletters should be edited to provide useful and interesting information for their target audience within the constraints of available resources. By providing this information, the organization comes to be trusted in various ways associated with its mission, for example, spending wisely on deserving initiatives. This hopefully leads a large enough proportion of subscribers to deeper involvement with the organization, for example, attending one of its events or donating to one of its projects or programs. In return, the constituent benefits from the content of the event and from feeling that they have helped support a worthy initiative.

In many cases, constituent interests will not be aligned so neatly, but it should nevertheless remain the goal of this value-oriented planning. For example, permission-based marketing tries to ensure that people do not receive e-mails, phone calls, or letters that they do not want. While unscrupulous marketers may spam, and not respect do-not-call requests and lists, those that follow the best practices will find that there are efficiency gains: eliminating contacts from lists which are likely to be poor prospects increases the relative yield and lowers the marginal costs.

Tip

Warning

Be very careful when deliberately designing processes that make it hard for constituents to do something they want to do, but the organization doesn't want them to do. Processes which are designed to make it difficult for a constituent to get something from an organization (such as access to staff time, which may be expensive to fund) need to make sense, given your business model. Voice-mail hell, the damage it does to an organization's brand, and its ability to deliver to its constituents and partners in collaboration, is an example of a misguided or a poorly-executed effort to reduce the cost of providing information. In contrast, a purely online service, with online forums and contact forms, that do not purport to offer phone support, may better meet constituent expectations while providing lower service levels. If your organization is devoting large amounts of resources to activities that do not significantly advance its core mission, consider ways to leverage that activity to better achieve your mission, re-engineering it to require fewer resources, or even eliminating it. Rationing a service by making it hard to access is not the first alternative to consider, but one of the last.

Are you frustrating people by setting up false expectations? It is better that people know it will take a few days for the organization to respond to an online query before they start filling it out, since they might choose to work harder at doing a search of your site for the answer. Work to anticipate constituent questions and needs. For example, you could set up auto-responders for your Contact Us form to send out a link to frequently asked questions on your website. This serves the dual purpose of collecting e-mails for further educational outreach efforts (permission-based, of course!) while providing contacts with information likely to be of use.

For these kinds of strategies to work well —lowering costs and improving outcomes for both constituent and organization through automation—it is necessary to know your constituents well enough to understand the types of questions they ask or information they are looking for.

As part of your planning, you should analyze the types of constituents interacting with your organization, the ways they interact with it, and how well those interactions serve their needs. Conversations (on Facebook, in forums, or in person), surveys with open-ended text responses, or more structured focus groups with constituents or prospective constituents can suggest ways of segmenting constituents and useful places to focus on introducing innovations and reducing irritants. More quantitative and thinner feedback can be acquired via surveys with multiple-choice responses, more informally via Twitter, or by simply asking for a show of hands at an event. As the communication channel(s) you use will affect who receives your query, as well as their likelihood of responding, you should consider which methods are appropriate given the characteristics of your current constituent segments, as well as the ones you would like to develop. Don't rely on a single method either; diversify the ways you solicit input to ensure you are reaching a broad and representative audience.

CiviCRM is particularly well-suited to supporting the transactional side of your CRM initiative, including not only website and e-mail interactions, but also tracking meetings, phone calls, and even direct mail interactions. However, your overall CRM strategy needs to extend to social media and non-transactional interactions in forums and in person. Just as many for-profit companies have found that their results and brands can be strengthened by warm smiles, engaging manners, and a customer service orientation, your civic sector organization will realize benefits to incorporating these elements into your CRM strategy.

Rethinking organizational processes

We've already underlined the centrality of orienting analysis and discussion of business processes towards accomplishing the mission of your organization. We've also emphasized the importance of putting the constituent at the center of your thinking about business processes. Throughout this discussion, we've communicated the benefits of brainstorming new ways to do the same things by reaching outside the box and considering new ideas. We've also touched on the important but difficult topic of identifying processes that should be abandoned, as they no longer provide benefits commensurate with their cost. Resistance to change is strongest when existing processes are removed, but that can be overcome when you are able to identify better solutions that adequately replace the old.

There isn't space in this book to cover all of the issues involved in organizational design and business process re-engineering. We'd like to just touch on a few topics at the process and content levels.

First, the cost of organizational change means that there needs to be significant benefits before deciding to proceed. In any reorganization, there will be disruption as people worry about what the change will mean to them, as teams work through all the details, and as people are asked to learn new responsibilities.

Second, ensure you set the objectives clearly—responsiveness, cost efficiency, meeting new needs, and so on—and the criteria for evaluating the organizational change before evaluating the alternatives and selecting a solution. There will always be winners and losers in terms of budgets and desirable assignments. These will affect the perceptions and behavior of participants in the process, even among those with the best of intentions.

Every organizational design has its pros as well as cons. Problems often arise when there isn't a good alignment between functional units that cross organizational unit boundaries. The processes here need particular attention. Mismatched or inappropriate metrics may result in unnecessary friction in the prospect funnel, with constituents falling off the ladder of engagement due to poor experiences.

Take a website mailing signup form, for example. Every additional field, and every additional required field, on a signup form reduces the number of users who will complete it. There is almost a direct relationship between the rate of form abandonment and the number of fields requested. But tensions may develop if one unit designs a signup form with only name and e-mail fields in order to optimize the number of signups, while other units see the need for more data collection points. This overly simplified form may encourage signups, but wouldn't provide sufficient information to the staff responsible for mapping the contacts to cities or regions, or eliminating duplicates in the database. Inter-organizational tension along these lines is common; creating a clear system for addressing competing interests is the challenge.

The second content-related issue meriting attention is the need for changes in roles, training, compensation, and so on as part of the transition. Specifically, there may be some new online organizing as well as CRM administration responsibilities that require skill sets not currently found in the organization. The ability to administer various aspects of CiviCRM is not so different from what would be required for other information management systems. However, online organizing for fundraising, events, membership, volunteer recruitment, or just broadcast communications such as blast e-mails is different from the more traditional forms of these activities. Social media outreach, if a part of your CRM strategy, has very specific needs for effective and timely decision-making, as well as skill in projecting both personal tone and organizational themes. Your organizational plan should include not only initial training, but also ongoing training to reinforce the skills after they have been used.

But even more important than ensuring staff are adequately trained and prepared to implement these more advanced tools is the need to strive for organizational unity. With a growing set of tools at your staff disposal, and sufficient training to empower them to use the tools, you may find a rapid increase in communication and use of new methods that begins to create competition between different departments and roles. Perhaps the membership support staff prepare a membership recruitment e-mail scheduled to be delivered tomorrow morning, while the advocacy staff prepare a timely legislative memo to be delivered at the same time. Suddenly, you're competing with yourself for the attention of your constituents instead of working collaboratively to ensure a unified communication plan. Build bridges between departments and staff and encourage a global organizational perspective, even as you encourage the creative use of technology to deliver results.

After your plan is in place, you will need to pay attention to implementing the more organizational side of CRM strategy. We will not be discussing that in detail in this book, but some important points include the need to communicate the plan and intentions behind it clearly and repeatedly. Create a venue for discussion and be willing to respond to difficult questions. Don't present the plan as cast in stone; incorporate valuable suggestions into the plan as they are presented.

In an effort to make your constituents the focal point of your CRM strategy, we've deliberately discussed the technology that CiviCRM provides without emphasizing specific CiviCRM functions or methods of implementing a particular function. As a general rule, technology solutions should follow rather than lead; you first identify your needs and goals and then find the technology solution that best addresses those objectives.

That said, the real world often presents a more muddied process. Organizational maturity and resource constraints may mean your organization is identifying needs at the same time potential solutions are presented—which, in turn, help you better identify your needs and goals. The lesson can be illustrated by a car: while parked, it is very difficult to turn the wheels; once you start moving, it becomes much easier to steer. In real life, we don't always have a perfect understanding of what we need or what we should be aiming for. We need to set out in a direction and then adjust the wheel as we begin to see the landscape better.

Although we haven't spoken specifically about CiviCRM in this chapter, most of what we have covered has been presented with the software in mind.

CiviCRM provides tremendous flexibility and opportunity in how it can be used by organizations. It supports a wide range of business processes, and if anything, challenges you to think wisely about your internal workflows in order to standardize how the software will be used. CiviCRM processes are based on requirements from leading (and small) civic sector organizations and usually are the result of extensive community consultation. That's not to say there is no room for improvement or that your organizational needs will not require alternate process structures. However, the time-tested effectiveness of CiviCRM's workflows will warrant consideration as you consider your own organizational processes.

If you do find that you have a business process that does not seem well supported by CiviCRM after reviewing the documentation, it is usually best to post a question at CiviCRM Stack Exchange (http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/). You may find you just missed something obvious, or that there is a different but better way to accomplish your objective. Alternatively, you may find yourself advised to adopt a workaround or to help in developing new features, if you have available resources.