Building the team

A critical factor in the success of your CRM initiative will be deciding who is on your team. The size of the team will obviously vary among differing organizations; those with 3 staff members will have to do things differently than those with 300. While this section is oriented towards larger organizations, the principles apply to any size.

The implementation team should include the people who will play a direct role in the ongoing project development. Not everyone affected by the CRM initiative needs to be on this core team tasked with driving the strategy and implementation. A good working group is seldom larger than six to eight people, and very often, a smaller group can be more effective. To get where you want to be, it is a good idea to have a representative project team where the different voices of the organization will be heard. Apart from representation, it is also good to have a mix of talents in the team. Some tasks will require extrovert communication skills, while others will require introvert detailed analysis.

Usually, it is immediately clear that the involvement and cooperation of some individuals in the organization will be necessary for the success of the initiative. In addition, it is important to have a variety of people representing different roles on the team. The team members must bring the right mix of expertise and experience to the project, be willing to work together to effectively accomplish what needs to be done, and work in order to ensure that the perspectives and needs of all the affected parts of the organization are heard and weighed appropriately. If you have close links to external stakeholders, involving them in your CRM strategy development, and testing before roll-out, can dramatically improve the success of your initiative.

As representatives for the initiative inside and outside the organization, the team members are ideally placed with the goal to advocate and evangelize for their own sub-constituencies in support of the overall CRM vision. What do we mean by that? Each member of the team should represent a voice in your organization—management, front-line staff, communication, accounting/bookkeeping, event coordination, advocacy, end user constituents, developers, different kinds of external stakeholders, and so on—each with their own expectations, goals, and concerns with the CRM implementation. The combined diversity of perspective is essential in order to achieve a well-balanced and effective team.

A key role in your project will be the project manager. He, or she, will lead the project process on a daily process, report to the directors or management team about the process, take decisions within the boundaries of the project, and is the face of the project in the organization. In an ideal world, the project manager manages the process of the project, not the contents. The project manager needs to have enough body to take decisions. It is probably better to have someone who can lead a team and inspire others, than someone who knows all the details and wants to control all aspects in all the details.

As a project manager, you will also need to judge whether people who are likely to be resistant to change, or to the initiative in general, should be brought into the tent early or late. Their opposition, or reluctance, may be due to their personality, a pattern of conflict with a team member, fear of change, institutional factors such as loss of control of data or budget, or perceived criticism as systems and work in their area of responsibility are targeted for improvement. Our experience is that it is usually better to bring them in early, so that their voices can be heard and their concerns addressed during the implementation. Accept that initial resistance to change is human, is required to be able to really make the change, and has value. Acknowledge and incorporate as many positive aspects from the existing ways of doing things as possible, and ensure that there is adequate opportunity for familiarization and training with the new system in order to encourage that buy-in. Skeptical voices are valuable when they help to provide a reality check on optimistic ambitions, but can become poisonous if they veer towards unreasonable negativity.

The ideal team may include the following:

• An executive or board sponsor of the initiative who is able to articulate the vision, allocate adequate resource, resolve issues, and inspire the project team
• Process owners in functional areas such as communication, event management, fundraising, and membership management
• One or more key staff users, who know about how things are done now, and the details of the processes
• Technical expertise, in-house and/or consultant, covering CiviCRM, your CMS (Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress), legacy systems, databases, and server management.
• External stakeholders, especially when their stake in your organization's success is significant.

Note

The executive director at FPAGM, Mojan Ahmed, undertook a systematic review of the organization and its processes, 3 months into her tenure. The 6-month exercise included the board of directors, staff, key players from the food pantries, food donors, volunteers, staff from local politicians' offices, and a bureaucrat from the city. A key outcome of the review was the decision to invest in a new information system. Her judicious selection of stakeholder representatives has resulted in early assurances that the city government and a local philanthropic foundation will provide grants that will cover the anticipated cost of the CRM implementation and associated training together.

Your team needs to think about how to facilitate feedback from other parts of the organization on the existing system, the new system, the project, and all aspects of your CRM goals.

As you construct your team and consultation/feedback mechanisms, it's important to keep in mind that the best CRM initiatives involve systems, processes, and behavior patterns. Communication about the CRM initiative will need to occur at all organizational levels. The efforts expended on consultation and involvement of staff and volunteers throughout the process can lead to worthwhile results with respect to organizational change, even if few technical changes take place. Your aim should be to facilitate proper organizational alignment with the CRM vision and objectives, which will help people feel more responsible for things they have contributed toward, approved, and shaped.

Tip

Suggestion: As your team and methodology fall into place, consider using a project management tool to help track issues as they arrive, document every step of the process, define milestones and release targets, and keep your team members honest. This is particularly important if you are a large organization with many stakeholders involved in the process. Having an electronic paper trail to reference is critical as you work through the decisions, define specifications, and roll out the software. There are a number of excellent web-based project management tools that can be used for this purpose.

Getting started

At the beginning of a CRM project, you will need to do some planning, whether this means creating a feature backlog for the discovery phase of an Agile process, pre-planning for an iterative process, or the initial work in the planning phase for a waterfall process. What planning you should do, and when you do it, will vary depending on the process adopted for your CRM project, the general management practices for approving and analyzing projects in your organization, and possibly the requirements of external funders such as foundations and other grant-giving organizations.

The following outline of preliminary activities includes some items that may not be required by less formal and less structured organizations. Even if you're treating your CRM project as limited exclusively to the technical implementation of one or more CiviCRM components such as online donation processing, we encourage you to review this section for ways to make it a success.

While the list is arranged according to the general order it should be done, you will want to expect and plan for an iterative process. Planning is a process of refinement, learning and adjusting as the project takes shape. The later portions of this section will expand on requirements for specific components of CiviCRM, but first we will look at getting started from a broader view.

Creating a baseline

Assuming that you are implementing a new CRM because improvements to your current system are desired, begin by developing an inventory of the current state of customer relationship management in your organization:

• Create a list of the main types of constituents that interact with your organization, such as volunteers, donors, attendees, board members, staff members, website visitors, and so on. And remember they do not have to be mutually exclusive!
• For each type of constituent, list the important types of interactions they have with your organization.
• Identify actionable metrics that measure the quantity and quality of relationships.
• Create an inventory of all systems that interact with or about the constituents in some shape or form.

FPAGM memberships

FPAGM begins its planning process by reviewing its membership structures, as they essentially form the backbone of the organization. Members drive the organization mission, provide a significant portion of the organization revenue, and are the front-line service providers to the community.

FPAGM is simplifying its organizational structure in various ways, including moving from nine to three membership categories. Historical differences between the small rural church pantries and the larger urban, secular, non-profit organizations, and between the small restaurants and large food distributors, will be dealt with through board representation, program operations, and fees. The new membership categories are as follows:

• Regular: Food pantries in the region are eligible to become regular members of the Association, and all but one has already done so. Pantries who join the Association agree to adhere to a code of conduct, which includes statements concerning non-discriminatory practices and a willingness to work collaboratively with other pantries towards the goal of fairly and charitably reaching the needs of the area's poor. FPAGM currently has 43 regular members. The annual fee is $250.
• Affiliate: Organizations that donate food to pantries in the region are eligible to become affiliate members of the Association. 127 have done so, including a produce distribution center, two food wholesalers, a grocery store chain, several other independent grocery stores, and a large number of restaurants. These businesses support the Association through their involvement in the organization, as well as through providing surplus food for distribution to the pantries. The annual fee is $100.
• Supporting: Individuals or organizations that embrace the mission of the Association and support it through monetary donations and through service or in-kind donations may choose to become supporting members. FPAGM currently has 56 supporting members. While the minimum annual fee is $50, some have given considerably more.

The regular and affiliate categories operate on 1-year membership periods from January 1 through December 31. Supporting members operate on a 1-year rolling period by default, though the size of the gift may dictate a longer membership period at the discretion of the executive director and board of directors. Employees of any member organizations inherit membership benefits by virtue of the parent organization.

Developing the vision

We've talked a lot about the need to build a well-represented team and to spend time identifying the full extent of your constituents. Now, encourage organizational unity by developing a shared vision for your CRM and its place in your organization:

• The vision can be the basis of planning goals and metrics for measuring success.
• Focus on the mission of the organization and how it is realized through relationships with constituents.
• List some functional possibilities that you need in the future, such as online event registration or contributions.
• List possible ways of overcoming current pain points. For example, data silos between staff or departments that currently result in data duplication and lack of sharing.
• Focus on the user experience with your organization in typical interactions. Alternate between big picture identification and examination of constituent segments (either analytically through data analysis or anecdotally through staff and expert exposition), and close-up details of specific users and incidents.
• Pay attention to the funnel(s) of prospects for high-value types of constituents. Depending on your organization and mission, these may be volunteers, activists, donors, new members, or others, such as the public your organization is trying to educate about something. Clarify the levels of engagement for these types of constituents (for example, website visitor, newsletter subscriber, online activist, event attendee, donor, in-person volunteer, or board member), and the value proposition at each step. Consider new business activities such as creating a free monthly newsletter to acquire prospects, or premium members-only pre-event meet-and-greet gatherings to help with volunteer recruitment.
• Spend energy brainstorming the following:
  • Ways to reduce time-consuming and repetitive tasks of staff and volunteers, for example, making more processes self-serve online
  • Eliminating some tasks altogether if they do not adequately help the organization realize its mission
  • Imagining new ways to accomplish your mission, for example, beginning to use viral marketing and social media
• Optimizing business processes for external experience, internal efficiency, and general usefulness before automating them
• You may want to consider articulating the desired goals and metrics using Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound (SMART) project management criteria for more controlling and formal organizations, or Doable, Understandable, Manageable, Beneficial (DUMB) ones for less management-heavy ones (visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria).

Note

The food pantry needs of the greater Metropolis community have grown significantly over the last few years, and FPAGM seeks to find ways to increase the operational efficiency while providing greater levels of service to its members.

Furthermore, their members have expressed a desire to increase networking and cooperation among each other. In particular, they want to learn from shared experiences and find ways to discourage people from abusing the services provided (pantry hopping). Recent resistance from the city government has forced the Association to take a more aggressive role in state and local advocacy, such as ensuring that laws and regulations that support the mission of the organization are put in place. This means that FPAGM must look for ways to present its issues, concerns, vision, and constituents in a more public fashion.

All of this has led your organization to begin the process of rebuilding their website and implementing constituent relationship management software. You chose Joomla! as the content management system for your website because of its ease of use for administrators and the variety of extensions available for building the site functionality. You've selected CiviCRM for your contact management needs because of the diverse toolset it will provide, both for your immediate contacts, members, event management needs, as well as your future goal to begin case management tracking.

You anticipate using online membership forms to solicit new members, expose profiles for member contact detail management, provide event registration forms for training events and the annual conference, and promote contribution forms for members to place orders for food delivery. They also plan to have online donation pages and may begin having periodic campaigns for more focused fundraising efforts.

You plan to develop appropriate metrics as your next step in developing FPAGM's CRM plan.

Creating a project plan

Create a preliminary project plan as follows:

1. Determine the project scope.
2. Estimate a timeline for software release(s), major stakeholder communication, training, and other project milestones.
3. Estimate the monetary, human, and technical resources required, providing the basis for a preliminary budget of the total cost of ownership for all phases of the project, including both the implementation and ongoing annual costs. You might not know all the detailed figures at this point in the process, so you can have estimated figures here. Do make sure, though, that it is clear that the budget will be subject to revision.
4. Estimate the benefits in terms of the following:
   • Cost saving through efficiencies (staff time able to be redeployed, switching some communications from postage and printing to e-mail, and so on)
   • Increased revenue generation (donations, ticket sales, and so on)
   • Mission-oriented success metrics
5. Sample metrics may include the following:
   • Clients served (number of cases, time to resolution, number of repeat clients, client evaluations of service and organization, and so on)
   • Number of events offered
   • Ticket sales (number and value)
   • Donations (number of donors, frequency of giving, recency of latest donation, and average amount of donation)
   • Bequests arranged and received
   • Memberships (number, geographic, sectors, or other coverage of target audience)
   • Volunteers (number, frequency, recency, average number of hours, higher-value kinds of volunteering, and so on)
   • Grants (applications received processed, average time of processing, number approved)
   • Newsletter subscribers (number, churn rate, opens, click-throughs, completions of calls to actions)
   • Media (number of mentions, reach, and tone of coverage)
   • Web traffic (number of unique visitors, repeat visitors, length of stay, forwards to friends, number of Facebook fans, number of Twitter followers, number of retweets, and so on)
   • Search engine (page rankings for various key terms)
6. Set out the assumptions underlying the plan.
7. Identify risks to the project success that will need to be reduced, mitigated, or otherwise managed.
8. Combine the budgeted costs with the estimated benefits to develop a projection of the financial and non-financial return on investment.

Depending on the scope of your project, and how you view it with regard to your overall mission, a more extensive environmental analysis (such as the SWOT method: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) could prove useful during this stage. Though you may look at the CRM initiative as largely an IT function, the reality is that it will impact every facet of your organization, and thus should be viewed from this macro level. A review of business process re-engineering could also be considered as an early activity because of its general importance and opportunity to think cross-functionally.

Total cost of ownership

We just mentioned, in the previous section, the need to calculate the total cost of ownership in order to provide a sense of the expected return on investment in a CRM initiative. The initial cost of acquiring and deploying software systems is usually a fraction of their total cost of ownership. This is especially true for enterprise systems such CRMs that tend to have longer effective lives. Considering the full extent of project costs, over the life of the software, will help you allocate resources and budget finances more effectively.

Although CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress are free open source software projects, they do have costs associated with them. In addition to training for users, administrators, and any in-house developers you may have, there is a need for ongoing maintenance and support of your software and data and hosting.

Security upgrades or patches need to be applied regularly to both your CMS software and CiviCRM. We recommend upgrading at least a few times a year as new major versions are released, but not necessarily for each minor revision release. Keeping current with upgrades allows you to take advantage of new features as they are released, while also ensuring you are addressing security issues that may have been identified. If you have customized or overridden CiviCRM functionality, you should expect there to be some costs associated with modifying the customized files on your site during upgrades.

A major reason why software costs are ongoing for organizations is that organizations are not static. What your organization does and how it does it will change, both as you implement your CRM initiative, and after it is actively in use. The interlinked nature of work processes and software systems means that you will need to continue to adapt, reconfigure, and re-customize CiviCRM for as long as your organization uses it.

A second area where organizations need to plan for ongoing resources for a CRM system is keeping their data clean. Depending on the nature of your constituents, and the ways you collect data from those constituents, you may find issues with incomplete, incorrect, and duplicated constituent information. Automated merging and elimination of duplicates is useful, but rarely meets the extent of your data-cleaning needs. Manual work reviewing potential duplicate records is time consuming, but essential.

A properly conceived CRM initiative will yield benefits that more than cover the total cost of the system in terms of improved relations with constituents and cost efficiencies realized from labor-saving automation. Actually, the costs should no longer be IT costs, but an integral part of the budgets of the respective areas of the mission and the parts of your organization that use the system heavily.