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, with a larger number of unqualified prospects needing to enter at the top, in order to have a smaller number of sales fallout at the bottom. The second one is the notion of a ladder of engagement, with contacts being 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. Pushing deeper, or rather climbing higher in the analogy, you eventually would love for the constituent to 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, that is, 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 step on the ladder (or level in the funnel), 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 doing much to 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 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, and even Facebook posts and 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 organization 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 is likely to initiate an interaction, the interaction is likely to be of value to both the 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 that should remain the ideal. 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. The processes which are designed to make it difficult for a constituent to get something from an organization (usually expensive, like staff time) need to make sense, given your business model. Voice-mail hell, and 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 does 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 frequently asked question sheets for the main areas of interest. 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 very well.
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.
As social media becomes more mainstream and more people become active participants in causes and organizations they care about, you will find that your organization has more opportunities to harness your constituents' willingness to criticize, suggest, and collaborate. CiviCRM is particularly well-suited to the transactional side of your CRM initiative, including not only website and e-mail interactions, but also tracking meetings, phone, 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.
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 on putting the constituent at the centre of thinking about business processes. Throughout, we've tried to communicate the benefits of brainstorming new ways to do the same things and reaching outside the box to consider new ideas. We've also touched on the important but painful topic of ceasing to do some of the things that have always been done. Resistance to change is strongest when existing processes are removed and the least when new ones merely supplement the old.
There isn't space in this book to adequately 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 reassigned to learn new responsibilities.
Second, ensure you set the objectives—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.
Aim to design the organization so that the business units can be responsible for delivering sizable chunks of the CRM strategy and be accountable for the metrics under their control. 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 on either side of the boundary may result in unnecessary friction in the prospect funnel, with constituents falling off the ladder of engagement due to poor experiences.
For example, every additional field and every additional required field on a sign-up form reduces the number of users who will complete it. 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. This 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 unfortunately, less common.
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 than what is required for other information management systems. However, online organizing for fundraising, events, membership, volunteer recruitment, or just broadcast communications like 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.
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, but some important points include the need to communicate the plan and intentions behind it clearly and repeatedly. Discussion and response to difficult questions will be required, including incorporation of valuable suggestions into the plan.
While trying to make your constituents the focal point of your CRM strategy, we've deliberately discussed the technology that CiviCRM provides, but only indirectly. While it is true that technology solutions should generally follow rather than lead, it is also true that organizational maturity and resource constraints may mean that your organization will best benefit from using the processes that are well supported by CiviCRM.
In many areas, CiviCRM provides great flexibility in how it can be used. It supports a wide range of business processes and the challenge is more in simplifying and standardizing how it will be used, rather than in devising new ways to customize it. CiviCRM processes are based on requirements from leading 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 find that you have a business process that does not seem well-supported by CiviCRM after reviewing CiviCRM documentation, it is usually best to post a question into an appropriate CiviCRM forum at http://forum.civicrm.org/. 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 work-around or to help in developing new features, if you have available resources.