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Is Google AdWords Killing Your Online Engagement?

Nathan Porter - April 4, 2018

Is the Google AdWords Grant Killing Your Online Engagement

If you’re a small nonprofit with limited time, looking for a quick strategy for online engagement, Google AdWords or the Google AdWords grant is not a great place to start. I’ve thought this for a few years now, but it really started solidifying in my mind over the last few weeks. There actually are a number of reasons why this is probably the case. Here are at least 5 reasons you should consider not making Google AdWords part of your strategy if you are a small nonprofit.

It’s Premature

If you remember nothing else, this is by far the largest and most important point I want to make. So many people I run into are looking for a silver bullet, that one thing they can do to rocket their audience engagement forward with very little effort. Let me tell you right now, that doesn’t exist. And if it did, AdWords wouldn’t be it.

I can’t tell you how many organizations I have talked to who are disappointed and confused about why their Google AdWords grant isn’t delivering a better payoff for them. Taking one look at their Google Analytics is a quick way to see why this is. If your bounce rate is over 70 percent and your traffic sources show Paid Advertising driving more that 65 percent of your traffic, you’re not doing something right.

Google AdWords is a tool to amplify your message. This means that your messaging (online platforms) has to be on point and doing well organically (without advertising) before it merits adding fuel to the fire. You’re much better off looking at your messaging, user flows, and audience engagement and really taking the time to make sure that is on point before ever thinking about trying to drive additional traffic to your online platforms. If you have a bad website that doesn’t tell a clear story and doesn’t offer any value to your audience, why would you want to drive a lot of extra traffic to it?

Start with a full review of your platform and make sure your story is clear and engaging, and your user flows are specific and clear. Then build a content plan and begin creating original content on your site. Then create a social media and email marketing strategy for the content on your website. Once all of that is optimized and working well and generating lots of organic traffic and engagement … then and only then should you consider whether amplifying your message is right for your organization.

It’s Complicated

Google AdWords is not an easy thing to set up correctly. There are a lot of things you need to think about before getting to the place of amplifying your message by driving traffic to it (see above). You first need to make sure you have appropriate landing pages setup, then you have to do market and competitor research to make sure your ad keywords are properly targeted and that you’re targeting keywords that are low enough competition to be worth going after. This is especially true for Google AdWords grant, where your max bid allowed is $2. Finally you need to create ad copy and images that are clear, to the point, and matched to your keywords and landing pages. For a typical small ad campaign there are around 100 variations of text and image ads that need to be created. Finally you need to target, schedule, and test your ad campaigns to make sure they are effective and being effectively targeted.

We manage Google AdWords campaigns for larger clients, and we typically spend 50-200 hours just doing all the prep and setup to launch a Google AdWords campaign. Suddenly the AdWords grant doesn’t look so free after all. There are a lot of things that are simpler that will get better results for less effort if you’re small and just starting out.

It’s Not Worth the Effort

There are a number of reasons why the Google AdWords Grant in particular is not worth the effort. One glaring reason is that the free advertising that is offered through the Google AdWords Grant is very limited in its scope. For example, you can only bid up to $2 per click for keywords. We aren’t all that into Google AdWords as an agency, but we still manage about $50k of AdWords campaigns every month. Even relatively low-competition keywords are in the $2.50 CPC range, and high-competition keywords can be $20-$25 per click. Don’t think you’re going to be competing with the healthcare sector, for instance, on hot keywords in your industry.

Unless you already have a well-oiled marketing machine with a well-maintained platform and know that you can make use of niche, low-competition keywords to reach your audience, it probably isn’t worth the effort to launch a Google AdWords campaign. Start with some easier, quicker payoff steps. (See end of article)

It’s Too Easy

This is said a little tongue in cheek. The idea of the Google AdWords Grant can feel so sexy and so easy. After all, it’s free traffic for your website, right? What is there to lose? As outlined above, while it may seem easy and free as a concept, there are a lot of steps you should take in order to really make it work for your organization. If you haven’t looked at your messaging, your platforms, your userflows, your content marketing plan, and your online engagement, you probably aren’t going to see a benefit from the Google AdWords Grant, and it certainly isn’t the place to start.

It’s Shortsighted

Whether you are new to building online engagement or have an established and proven strategy, Google AdWords or the Google AdWords Grant shouldn’t be your primary strategy. There are a lot of reasons why this is, but a simple way of thinking about it is that creating traffic and engagement with Google AdWords is like renting your traffic. As soon as that ad spend goes away, so does your traffic. As soon as competition for that keyword jumps above $2 CPC, your traffic goes away. If your ad spend stays the same, your traffic will stay exactly the same or decline slightly. There is no payoff that increases with time. This is in sharp contrast to an organic traffic strategy where you’re building engagement with valuable, original content and creating an audience of fans of your brand. This is investing in something you own: your website. This strategy organically grows your audience over time. And with the right strategy, you can actually compete for those really high-value keywords by showing up in organic results for those keywords. This is way better than trying to compete using paid results as your only strategy.

Start Here Instead

The good news is that there are a lot of things you can do that cost you nothing but your time and effort, and will give you great results and quickly.

Optimize Your Messaging and Website

We’ve written a bunch of helpful articles about analyzing your online platforms (typically your website) and optimizing them to reach your audience and engage them. These questions can help you think about what you should prioritize on your website.

1. Who is your online audience?

This may not be the same as your overall audience, your offline audience, or your email audience. Who engages with you online specifically?

2. Of your online audiences, which one is lowest commitment?

Often when you think about people who interact with your website, there is a low-commitment audience that may not know who you are or feel a sense of connection or obligation to your organization. What is the 5-second message they need to see/hear to become engaged with your brand? Lead with that on your home page.

3. What does your About page say about your organization?

A lot of organizations don’t realize that a single, clear “about us” page is the second most visited page on your website. This is true across the spectrum of the nonprofit industry. People are looking for a simple, clear message about who you are, why they should care, and why they should support you. Don’t clutter this area with a gazillion submenus or use the About page as a dumping ground for every possible piece of data about your organization, its financials, and anything else you can think of. Your audience is begging to be sold on your organization—give them what they want.

4. Do you have a content marketing plan?

Consistency is 1000 percent key when it comes to content marketing. You have to be clear, original, and repetitive in order to succeed with an organic content marketing strategy. You should be posting something new to your website, news feed, or blog at least once a week. Also, don’t be random. If a robot like Google is trying to figure out who you are and what you’re all about and you feed them random information, you’ll confuse the robot. Make sure you stay on topic and keep your scope somewhat narrow in order to build authority on the subject matter you are trying to rank for. You would be surprised what keywords you rank for with your website. Check it out for yourself: this tool will show you what keywords appear most frequently on your website.

5. Email and Social Media Campaigns

Email and Social Media campaigns are channels to drive traffic back from your website. They are free ways to begin amplifying your message. Work on using them consistently and segmenting your audiences so you’re speaking directly to your audience’s interests.

Feeling overwhelmed? Need some help finding the right direction? We do this stuff everyday and would love to talk to you about your questions. We can even provide you with an online engagement audit that offers specific advice for your organization on next steps for your online engagement strategy.

CiviCRM Is Getting a New User Experience – Shoreditch Theme

Nathan Porter - March 21, 2018

CiviCRM is getting a new look - the Shoreditch theme

If you’ve used CiviCRM at all, you can surely appreciate that the interface feels like something that was developed in the early 2000s before the trend toward mobile-responsive designs ushered in the era of larger, cleaner, more modular page structures and design elements. If you’re using it on a desktop and have taken the time to get past some of the oddities of the interface, it mostly works pretty well. That being said, it definitely doesn’t inspire a sense of beauty, peace, or general well-being.

The shame here is that while the underlying structure of CiviCRM has undergone many iterations of updates to make it faster, sleeker, and more secure, the UX design has remained largely the same. All of that is about to change in 2018!

A Quick Look at the Nonprofit CRM UX Landscape

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that while CiviCRM’s UX is dated, CRMs, in general, haven’t been exactly at the top of the list for most beautiful User Experiences.

Raiser’s Edge 7 vs. Raiser’s Edge NXT

Just a few years ago Raiser’s Edge from Blackbaud had one of the most hideous interfaces I can think of. Only recently with the launch of Raiser’s Edge NXT did they present something that doesn’t cause me to recoil in horror. Check out this comparison shot from Neon CRM’s recent review of the platform, and you’ll see what I mean.

Raisers Edge Web View

Salesforce.com vs. Salesforce.com Lightning (LEX)

Similarly, Salesforce.com recently underwent a complete interface redesign that took their platform interface from something that felt dated to something that feels slightly less dated in 2016, and slightly revised that in Fall 2017.

Salesforce Before and After Screenshots

One of the reasons these interfaces change so slowly is because of the enormity of the impact a single alteration can make. Not only does the underlying functionality and code have a lot of interdependencies that can break with these sorts of changes, but the tens of thousands of users can have a difficult time adjusting to changes in their workspace. One of the changes Salesforce.com made to their interface in 2016 was to alter their navigation menu from a horizontal top menu to a vertical left side menu. They had so much negative feedback from this one change that they switched it back in their Fall 2017 update.

CiviCRM’s New UX

Background and Effort

As with many great CiviCRM projects, this one was largely undertaken by a CiviCRM partner organization, in this case the Compucorp Team lead by Jamie Novak with funding for the project coming from the Zing Foundation. The CiviCRM core team has also contributed to the project. This is the single most significant retheming of the platform since it launched 13 years ago. This is no small task. This is not just a matter of changing some colors and fonts. This requires a complete rethinking of many of the underlying structural elements of CiviCRM and making sure proper hooks are in place to allow for making the platform responsive and providing support for changes to all elements of the interface—all while ensuring that none of the 1 million-plus lines of code are broken.

Already the project has involved over 20 contributors with a majority of the contributions coming from three or four individuals. Nearly 500 hours of effort have gone into this project, which has also included core platform changes. Started in 2015, this project is nearing completion now, after three years of labor.

To get a sense of how big a deal this actually is, consider this: Salesforce.com and Raiser’s Edge make hundreds of millions of dollars every year in sales of licensing and subscriptions through their platforms. Raiser’s Edge NXT (13-15K orgs) and CiviCRM (10-12K orgs) have fairly similar user bases in terms of size, yet CiviCRM operates like a nonprofit, offering their software for free and surviving off the contributions of the CiviCRM community, which totals a tiny fraction of the revenue these larger companies amass. It took these other companies many years to get to the place of making these sorts of significant updates to their platforms. CiviCRM, thanks to the dedication of the core team and community contributors, is making great progress in keeping up with the changing landscape in the nonprofit CRM market.

One advantage CiviCRM has that these other platforms don’t is that it is open source. The open-source model allows rapid development and rapid scaling because it is able to leverage the work of a community of contributors as well as other open-source platforms. The CiviCRM Mosaico extension was built on top of the great work of the folks who built the Mosaico email template project, greatly reducing the amount of effort required to bring that level of feature to CiviCRM users. Read all about CiviCRM Mosaico here.

First Look at the New Look

This is what you came for. So let’s dive right into what is changing with Shoreditch, the codename for the new CiviCRM theme framework.

Contact Dashboard

The new contact dashboard utilizes the screen real estate in a much smarter way, highlighting the things you use frequently. One feature you’ll notice is the introduction of a vertical left side menu instead of the not-useful, widgetized sidebar.

CiviCRM Before and After Shoreditch

 

  • I always felt like the tabs on the screen were more a part of the dashboard content than a menu. The sidebar is a smart way to highlight this differentiation.
  • I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people hunting for the actions menu. Now it is clearly delineated through the use of color.
  • I absolutely hate the yellow/green/gray color that was so pervasive in the old theming of CiviCRM. Now we have a restful light blue-gray color with a restrained and tasteful use of brighter colors to highlight important elements.
  • I love that the top-level menu is a lighter color, allowing it to sort of fade away while giving the unique on-screen content the weight it deserves.

In a nutshell this revision eliminates the extraneous elements on the screen that have nothing to do with the content you are working on at the moment. The only global element that is visible is that top-level menu. Everything else on the screen is focused on the task at hand, which is previewing this specific contact’s details.

Activities

One of the features on the contact record that I really like in the new version is the activities feed.

Before – Main View

CiviCRM Activities Before Screenshot

  • In this before screenshot, everything looks fairly jumbled. There doesn’t seem to be any clear visual order.

Before – Detail View

CiviCRM Activities Before Screenshot 2 - Modal Window Popup

  • When I click to view an activity, I’m presented with a modal which takes me out of the context of the list of activities.

After – Main View

CiviCRM Activities After Screenshot - Timeline View

  • The new presentation of the activities presents things in a nice timeline view with the date prominently displayed above each entry.

After – Detail View

CiviCRM Activities After Screenshot - Extra Detail

  • When I click to expand an activity it presents it to the right of the timeline, which helps me to maintain the context of the activity and easily click to the next one if I want to.

 

Search Results

Maximizing the use of screen space is huge with this UX update. Why have a big 27-inch monitor if your on-screen content width is restricted? It feels like I’m working on an old CRT monitor inside of my big flat screen. Perhaps search results and reports demonstrate this best. Look at the difference before and after for a search-result listing.

Before

Search Results in CiviCRM - Before View

After

Search Results in CiviCRM - After View

Feature and UX Updates to CiviCRM Components

The new Shoreditch project isn’t stopping at just retheming the primary CiviCRM interfaces. There are second-level projects in progress too, including an overhaul of CiviCRM Cases and the work done on the CiviCRM Mosaico extension. These projects create new or refined functionality along with a UX rework. We already mentioned the CiviCRM Mosaico project, and you can read more about that here. But the CiviCRM Cases project is worth spending a little more time looking at.

CiviCRM Cases

Though CiviCRM Cases was built with Case Management in mind, it’s a great way to organize any contact-specific project where you have a series of repeated tasks or you want to keep track of everything related to an ongoing project in one place. Our clients have used it for managing slightly more complex membership-onboarding processes, managing grant applications, or even just good old project management with tasks and milestones.

Check out these before and after screenshots!

Before

CiviCRM Cases Screenshot - Before View

After

CiviCRM Cases Screenshot - After View

If you’re like me, you had to look twice to see whether these are even presenting the same data. I like how it moves from high-level to detailed as you scroll down the page, and how the activities and milestones are highlighted so you can quickly see what’s happening across your “cases.” I also love that I can just click the “Activities” tab at the top to switch to an activities feed across all cases.

Gamechanger

Here are a few of the things people are saying about the new UX for CiviCRM.

“Beautiful! Wow, this is very impressive!” — Sean Madsen
“Looks really nice. I look forward to the day when it is complete and live for users” — ecotypes
“Awesome! This is really needed!” — dedicated web design

I Want It Now!

If you’re like me, you take one look at this and you want it right now! You aren’t alone. One look at the comments section of this introductory post about the project shows that there is pent-up demand for a friendlier CiviCRM User Experience. The first iteration of this should be ready to go by mid-2018, so, unfortunately, it’s not quite ready for primetime yet. But that shouldn’t stop you from getting involved. A project of this magnitude deserves lots of support, testing, and feedback. Here are some ways you can get involved:

  • Donate money to the CiviCRM project.
  • Download and test the Shoreditch Theme from Github.
  • Report issues and feedback to the Github Project.
  • Share this story with everyone you know. Get the word out!

Maybe we can work on a simplified menu for CiviCRM next. 🙂

Our Services

Nathan Porter - November 5, 2015

services, service, love, art, web design, nonprofit, organization, civicrm, crm, marketing, social media, city, work, business

Wanna Pixel Inc. is a full service creative services firm focused on the needs of social good organizations around the world.

Your organization is a brand that wants to be heard. We get that. From creatively designed web properties to social media campaigns, integrated membership management software to an integrated auction site, event planning to eLearning, we do it all. Things are always changing and we’re right there with the change, even setting the trends. and tomorrow morning we’ll probably find something new we’ve never done before. Can’t wait!

Web Properties

We develop completely unique touch-friendly and responsive web properties from the ground up. No two look the same, and why should they? Your organization wasn’t built from a template, why should your website be?
Having a web presence that is touch and mobile friendly is extremely important. A study by Morgan Stanley projects that by the year 2015, websites will receive more traffic from mobile devices that from traditional desktops and laptops. 2015 is already nearing it’s end and 2016 is already almost here so it’s important to think about these trends when planning for a new website. Besides being responsive and touch friendly, your website will be integrated with the services that are relevant to your organization. Some of the more common integrations are: Social Media, Event Management, Donations and Pledges, Donor Management Software, and Member Lists. Additionally we can create Facebook tabs and landing pages.

Integrated Cloud Solutions

The days of a website performing as only a marketing tool are gone. Today’s websites are fully integrated software solutions. The best are constantly updating and changing. A few of the most common backend software packages we integrate are:

Constituent Relationship Manager

We have worked with a few different solutions but the most flexible and customizable we have found is CiviCRM. Nathan Porter has spent 10 years in the corporate IT world between a software development firm, which designed custom software solutions for business management, and a small business IT Support company, which helped set up Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce CRM. In his opinion CiviCRM is more full featured for Member Based organizations than either of these. A few of the modules included are:

  • Contacts
  • Contributions
  • Events
  • Email Automation
  • Peer-to-Peer fundraising
  • Advocacy Campaigns
  • Case Management
  • Members

Online Auction Fundraisers

There are a lot of great fundraising ideas. One particularly popular one for online fundraisers is an auction site. If your organization’s constituents include businesses or students it’s great to get a little competition going on between teams to see who can win the most stuff from the auction.
Our auction sites are fully integrated and branded to look like your main site pages so your users won’t be asking, “Where am I?” when they click through to your auction site.

eLearning Center

An integrated eLearning Center is an excellent tool for many reasons. A few common ones are:

  • Training volunteers in many different geographic areas
  • Training your in-house organization employees
  • Offering a membership benefit or add-on of training courses related to your cause

Here are some of our favorite features.

  • Ability for a mixture of video and text in the training courses.
  • Course quizzes and tests at the end of each lesson.
  • Completion certificates.
  • Collective and individual scoring with the ability to export score data to Excel.
  • The ability to pause a training course and come back to it later.

We can assist with both creating the integration of the eLearning center and with creating training courses and videos. The member access to this service can be integrated with users who have other membership subscriptions.

SEO and Content Marketing
When it comes to your investment in web properties or just a web presence, in general, the only way to really multiply your investment in the design and software is through a robust SEO and Content Marketing strategy. What strategy you implement is different for each organization. An organization that is service a local community will want to implement a strategy that leverages local search and targets the traffic of local competitors, while a regional, national, or international organization will need to have a much larger view in terms of their SEO and Content Marketing targets.

We have experience in all types of organizations. We can tailor a solution to fit your needs and we will gladly teach you the basics of maintaining your SEO and Content Marketing strategy if you have the staff to maintain this area yourself. With the powerful tools we offer you’ll be reaching more of your target audience in no time!

Social Media Integration and Strategy

Social media is the largest driver of change in technology today. There is no question about this. In fact, a study done by Morgan Stanley shows that by 2015 more website traffic will be driven by Social Media than by web-based search engines. Now more than ever, it is crucial that you have a presence on social media and a plan for engaging it.

This is key to any good content strategy. We’ve got you covered from Facebook to Twitter, Google + to Pinterest, Instagram to Vine, just to name a few. We can help educate you on the current trends and work with you to develop a plan for engaging social media for your organization.

UkuuPeople: A CRM Experience just for WordPress

Nathan Porter - July 8, 2015

CRM, nonprofit, website, relationships, manager, marketing

Updated 7-08-2015 to reflect changes to product.

There’s good news for people in the WordPress community who are looking for a simple CRM solution! In 2008, WordPress emerged as a serious contender in the CMS market and to date has captured over 50 percent of the top one million websites built on a CMS. In just the last few years, WordPress has developed some serious momentum in the Enterprise space with some robust security utilities and the advent of tools like WooCommerce, which recently jumped passed Magento as the most used e-commerce tool on the top one million websites.

Though WordPress is evolving as a fully integrated enterprise solution. There are still a lot of services that are underdeveloped or completely missing! One of these is an integrated CRM solution.

Our firm has been largely involved in developing integrated full featured web applications for our clients and while we’ve found some other great open source solutions such as CiviCRM, SugarCRM and Presspoint CRM; most of these solutions require a high level of technical know how to setup and configure them correctly. Pretty overwhelming for most users. (We’ve worked to make some of these tools simpler by creating integration plugins like our Gravity Forms Integration for WordPress and CiviCRM.)

In July 2014 we took on the momentous project of building THE Simple CRM for WordPress. We initially formed a strategic partner with WebAccess Global to develop what today is know as UkuuPeople. Today (July 2015) Arete Imagine Inc. and Web Access Inc. have merged forming a new company Wanna Pixel Inc.

So what is so special about UkuuPeople? The core benefit UkuuPeople has over other CRM providers is that it is completely integrated with WordPress. This means that automating your data collection and data maintenance is fully within your reach.

Scenario 1: Imagine that someone in your contact database fills out a contact form with new contact information. Not only does the contact form get logged on the contact as a touchpoint but their contact info gets updated automatically.

Scenario 2: Your site has an E-commerce component as well as contact forms, surveys, etc. By pulling all of these datapoints into your contact touchpoint feed, you can see purchases, contact forms, as well as manually entered activities such as phone calls and meetings in one central activity feed giving you a true 360 degree view of your contact relationships.

Scenario 3: In the future we hope to give you additional visibility into the behaviours of your site visitors such as what pages they’ve visited, how long they stay on a given page and what their interests and preferences are. By having all of this information in one location you will be able to target the content they see when coming to your site and create very targeted marketing campaigns. This will also allow for better business intelligence, business decision making, and in general a better overall handle on the heath and engagement of your tribe!

I know you’re thinking… Well, sounds cool but I’m not sure I’m really ready to buy a CRM based on one article. The good news is it’s completely free and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repo! You get all of the basic plugin features with the option to upgrade to other features through paid add-ons.

 

Here’s what we have so far!

WordPress Dashboard Widgets

These two widgets are unique to the logged in user. They display your favorite contacts as well as your upcoming activities.

UkuuPeople Dashlets

 

Single Contact Dashboard

The single contact dashboard gives you an overview of the contact’s information as well as recent activities in the contact touchpoint list. The contact image will automatically pull from Gravatar if they have a profile setup. Otherwise you can upload an image for the profile.

UkuuPeople Contact Dashboard

Single Contact Dashboard – Income/Donations Widget

With the income/donations widget you can see a summary of this contacts financial relationship with your organization. These will include WooCommerce purchases, Give donations, EDD purchases, etc. Right now the only integration that utilizes this is the Give add-on.

UkuuPeople Contact Dashboard Info Widget

People Dashboard

The people dashboard gives you a quick graph showing Individuals vs. Organizations. It also gives you a sparkline for each individual contact showing you how active their relationship has been in the last 6 months. Here you can also filter your contacts by tag, tribe, type, or category.

People Dashboard

 

Touchpoints Dashboard

The touchpoints dashboard lists all of your touchpoints. These are color coded by touchpoint type. The touchpoint types are also shown visually in the bar graph at the top. These are filterable by TouchPoint type and TouchPoint Contact.

UkuuPeople Touchpoints Dashboard

Integrations

So far we’ve built out some pretty key integrations. We’re working on a few more and would welcome any developers who want to build their own! A unique integration is the MailChimp integration. Most WordPress MailChimp integrations simply send your form contact directly to MailChimp. Our integration allows you to match up your UkuuPeople Tribes to MailChimp mailing lists and sync them whenever you want!

UkuuPeople Integrations

 

Are you ready to try it out?

Download UkuuPeople Try The Demo

Have an idea?

Would you like to learn more about UkuuPeople?

Visit the Website

 

Want to suggest a feature or ask a question?

Talk to Us

The New Nonprofit Culture

Nathan Porter - February 26, 2015

change in nonprofit culture, CRM

(updated Dec. 2016)

Sometimes nonprofits are seen as second-class citizens. Not as advanced or cutting edge as for-profit organizations. But there’s a new wave of innovators in the nonprofit space and they’re demanding change and a new level of respect. It’s the new nonprofit culture.

Having worked in the technology and software space over the last 10 years I’ve seen this change occur and it’s directly related to the accessibility of enterprise tools in a hosted or cloud environment. Remember when every organization with 5 or more team members had their own in house server, a physical office, and a complicated phone system? Not anymore! A perfect example of this change is one of our clients who recently ditched their onsite server and phone system for Google Apps and a virtual phone system.

So how did all this come about?

Believe it or not, the transition started with a new website and cloud integrated CRM. Before that, this organization tracked 70% of their data in Excel spreadsheets and the rest in a variety of CRM tools such as ACT! and Raisers Edge. They also had a local version of QuickBooks which stored some contact/donor details and all of their accounting. With CiviCRM and a new website we consolidated all of this information in one place in the Cloud. Another thing happened as a result of this, they stopped maintaining all their data manually. What used to be a paper survey following an event now became an online survey that was automatically added to the individuals contact record. The added benefit to this is that if the new contact data captured is different from what is on file for the contact, their contact info is updated automatically. And because data is entered by the individual instead of a clerical employee somewhere, data tends to be more accurate. Enough about how awesome a CRM deeply integrated with your website can be…

The new website and CRM started an avalanche effect.

Our client quickly saw the possibility for automated data gathering, automated targeted marketing and automated relationship management. They wanted more. So with our help, they ditched their desktops for sleek laptops and tablets, ditched QuickBooks on premise for QuickBooks online, made the switch from a combination of Office 365 for Email and local server for file management to Google Apps for Email and Online File Management (remind me to write about our 6 month search for the best online file management tools, we picked Google Drive as the clear winner). They also ditched their hard wired phone system for a virtual PBX phone system. At this point all that was left to do was to adopt a distributed model and ditch the offices. So they did.

It’s not very often that I find an organization so embracing of change but this transformation has cut hard costs for the organization dramatically. Increased their productivity dramatically. And eliminated the need for clerical staff completely. They have more control of their data while making it more available at the same time.

This organization has an annual budget of around $3 Million and a staff of around 8.

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Lies We Won’t Tell You

Part of our value statement is “we value integrity, honesty, ingenuity, open communication, collaboration, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement, respect for each other, and respect for design.” Here are a few lies we won’t tell you.

WE HAVE A SOLUTION FOR EVERY COMPANY
One of the things I (Nate) dealt with in past jobs is creating an illusion for our customers that we offered a wide variety of solutions which we in reality did not offer. It was a smoke screen we put out there as a company to entice customers who were looking at other well known branded solutions to consider our primary solution.

Some people feel that offering a “wide variety” of solutions makes them look like a more experienced solution provider. In reality it means they are minimally experienced in many areas.

We focus on a few well known, and well researched solutions that we feel best meet our clients needs. That doesn’t mean we aren’t intimately familiar with other solutions or that the solutions we have selected will work best for all organizations. If our solution isn’t the right one for you, we are going to tell you and give you a recommendation of where you will find the best solution for your needs.

YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY IS GREAT
I say this sort of tongue in cheek because you might actually have a great brand and marketing plan. I like making people feel good. I would love nothing more than to tell you that your branding strategy and marketing plan is spot on! However, lying to you about the quality of your brand or marketing plan isn’t going to help anyone long term. Don’t feel bad though. I wouldn’t bring a criticism that I didn’t also have a solution to.

Our talent is taking a data driven approach to analyzing your current branding, technology, and marketing plan and maximizing your efforts to reach your audience and grow your organization!

YOU CAN'T DO THAT
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