It’s all about your process!

I’m going to take a step back from all the technology talk to discuss process.  How you do what you do, whether it’s fundraising, member management, or email blasts, is equally as important as what technology you use to do it.  When you’re implementing a new system, whether it’s Salesforce, eTapestry, Constant Contact, etc., it’s a great opportunity to review how you’re doing these things, and, more importantly, make changes to improve.

I recommend using some kind of process mapping tool (Microsoft Visio on the PC side, Omnigraffle on the Mac side) to help you visualize how to do this kind of stuff.  I like creating Flow Charts (people have usually seen these before) with Swim Lanes because people seem to intuitively "get" those more than other types of Business Process Modeling diagrams. It’s important to get all the process owners in a room and talk through how things go. 

In one instance, it turned out that the Membership team categorized the same person differently than the Program team, and they were using different terminology, even though the relationship to the organization was the same!  Imagine how confusing this can be when you’re talking about 4 or 5 processes that you’re trying to map to another system.

Another benefit to walking through (and mapping) these processes is that lots of "hidden data" tends to appear, sometimes to the surprise of other people on the same team!  Another war story: someone in Fundraising had been recording all donations in a private Excel spreadsheet, even though there was an existing custom Access database supposedly designed to track donations!  When asked for information about donations, no one could get the right info from the database, so they would always go back to the Fundraising person who magically had the right info.  Once everyone found out the "secret", there was a collective sigh of relief, and then they were able to work on fixing their broken system.

Here’s a sample process map to take a look at: