gokubi.com

Constraints

Our work as a software integrator is determined very much by the customers we work with. Their problems and opportunities become ours when we do a consulting project with them. We also inherit any constraints that our customer has. Over the years, we’ve seen three general constraints in our community of customers:

• Our customers work with limited funds. It is often difficult for them to secure money for technology projects.
• In general, our customers have very limited in-house technical resources. They focus their energies on fulfilling the mission, and don’t bring technical skills on staff.
• Each customer has a distinct set of problems it needs to solve in support of its mission.

These constraints fundamentally affect the way our customers go about their mission, and set the stage for how we can successfully work with them. But we bring our own constraints to the table as well:

• We have very limited time with which to address a seemingly infinite need.
• Our mission focus as a software integrator in the environmental community dictates that we leverage our work to benefit the movement
• We are not software developers who build tools “from scratch”, so must rely on the current universe of platforms as tools for solving customer problems.

It is within these two sets of constraints that a software integration project lives, and it is with these constraints in mind that we select application platforms as tools for creating solutions for our customers.

Guiding Principles come from those Constraints

When put into practice, the constraints outlined above lead to a handful of Guiding Principles that we follow when selecting application platforms. They aren’t hard and fast rules–unfortunately there’s no checklist to be ticked off where garnering 5 checkmarks makes a bad platform and 6 checkmarks a good one. It’s more a list of broad things to consider and weigh during the process. As you’ll see, many could be seen to be in direct conflict with each other. In the end, it’s a judgment call that is grounded in our mission, but is as much an art as a science. Even though it’s not a clear-cut process, our Guiding Principles fall into two broadly defined categories: concerns that directly affect our current customers, and broader concerns we have regarding our consulting practice and the movement in general.

I’ll cover those in Part 2 and Part 3.

The job description for my position was titled “Database Program Manager”. Database is a generic term for a pile of structured data that could be used to do just about anything. Your personal phone list is a database, as is the 2000 Census, MoviePhone, and the library card catalog. When I took the job I asked, what kind of databases am I supposed to build?

Nonprofits have diverse databse needs: Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education needs a database of precincts and how they voted in past elections, Washington Toxics Coalition needs a database of nasty chemicals, Resource Media needs a database of media outlets. All of these needs are mission critical, but there’s no way we could get good at doing all of them. Being a jack of all trades in the database realm is a sure path to insanity and financial ruin…trust me on this one.

Pretty early on I decided that focusing on relationship development was the best path. In the business world these relationship development functions are called Constituent Relationship Management, CRM for short. I proposed that if enviornmental nonprofits could get good at CRM, they would be better off, and the database program would be successful. To stay focused, we’d have to say no to non-CRM projects.

The folks at 37 Signals say that embracing constraints leads to creativity. I hoped this would be the case with my program. I hoped by focusing on CRM we could get really good at helping nonprofits excel at relationship development as a philosophy for interacting with customers. And maybe investing in this philosophical change would be more beneficial to the movement than trying to do the myriad types of database projects that may come our way.

Is to let a whole lot of smart people do most of the work…

In starting this program, I am leaning on bevy of great resources, many of which have been invaluable to me. I’ve gotten a lot of help from our peers, our customers, and our staff.

Outside of my company there is a community of smart people doing database consulting with the same kinds of customers we’re planning on serving. I’ve been grateful to learn from those smart people and their published materials. This summer, so many people responded kindly to my phone calls and emails for help. Thanks!

I was also really lucky that the timing of my hire lined up with AdvocacyDev II, a conference for developers who work in the nonprofit space. I got to be part of some great conversations about database consulting, constituent relationship management in the nonprofit world, and the database needs of advocacy activities. It was perfect timing for me, and a few times I felt like the conference had been set up just to help jumpstart my program!

Another key set of information has come from our customers. For many years they have been telling us about their database needs and woes. We’ve internalized those needs into our picture of general requirements of our customer base. We also rely heavily on great database contractors, and I’ve gotten a ton of info that they’ve passed on to staff.

And then the most important part from the standpoint of my sanity—my company really groks consulting with nonprofits. I get to drop a new program into a highly functional consulting framework—what a joy. The consultants here have things pretty tight and if I don’t thank them on a daily basis, I really should.

So, I took stock of everything I could find that was out there regarding database consulting. I spent a full two months doing research, digging through process documents, and tapping the brains of all these smart folks. And at the end I had a framework for a process on paper. A process that hadn’t been tested in the real world, but it was something.

Now girded with the lethal weapons of the consultant, the process and the framework, I was ready to embark on a perilous journey—taking the leap and choosing the software platform on which to base my consulting work.

Consulting is a short-term agreement between a customer and a consultant to get something done. A friend of mine described it as providing a Capable Brain for Rent. If that’s true, what do I expect our customers to want to rent my brain for?

To generalize broadly, the environmental nonprofits we work with are all trying to motivate action in service of a better environment in our region. They do this in a variety of ways—through legal protection, research, organizing citizens, or one of countless other approaches. They achieve their aims by targeting different populations—government and policy makers, ordinary citizens, corporations, etc. It ends up being a pretty fragmented movement, and it can be tough to see what all these groups have in common. It can be even harder to try to figure out what common needs could be served with a database application, and how to build consulting expertise to help them out.

But there are some things that most groups do:

• Bringing money in the door through fundraising and grants, and managing those financial transactions
• Planning and holding events for current donors/members/volunteers
• Communicating timely information to donors/members/volunteers. This can include email action alerts and newsletters.
• Performing outreach activities to find new donors/members/volunteers. Example activities include petitioning, and political campaign activities like canvassing and phone banking.

While the needs listed above seem wildly diverse, there is a thread holding them together—they all are come down to knowing constituents, and providing the constituent with relevant options for action. Action is what brings about the vision of the organization, and effective action on a large scale can have incredible impact.

Technology can support the motivating of action in a couple ways. First, having a really great way to house the names and data about your constituents gives the organization confidence it knows who it knows. Second, being able to record all the different communications it has with constituents and tracking their actions allows the organization to gauge its effectiveness.

This kind of technology is not easy to implement. In fact, nonprofits have been struggling with it for decades. I think we can help nonprofits implement a database that will help them activate their constituents—that can be incredibly powerful for a nonprofit with great ideas and the energy to follow through on them. And over time, the organization can develop mutually beneficial relationships with constituents that bring about large-scale change, and we can be a helping hand along the way.

I’ve heard consulting comes down to making a living helping other people work through their problems. While that also sounds like a decent definition of psychotherapy, I think it fits well enough. My company has been making a (not very fat) living on consulting for 10 years by targeting the problems of environmental nonprofits, and addressing them with a mix of technology and strategy. More recently, we’ve tightened our focus—online communications systems and strategies that increase effectiveness. Good communication is key to advocacy, and our work in this area has been successful for our customers and the environmental movement. (I’m probably the most immodest employee here…)

Unlike your average consulting shop, we’re incorporated as an environmental nonprofit organization. Officially part of the movement we serve, we have a larger stake in the success of our customers than just keeping the lights on and maintaining our good name. We try our best to deliver on our projects, but more than that we try our best to make the organizations that we work with more effective, because a more effective movement is really what we’re after.

It’s an interesting line to walk in a lot of ways. It’s a lot harder to say no when the client has an exciting idea they can’t quite afford. If we take it on, and potentially eat some of the cost, the world is better off, even if we might not be. The flip side is that we can come up with all sorts of great ideas for the kind of work that will movement forward, but if no customers feel the urgency to raise money for that kind of work, the project just won’t happen.

We’re certainly not unique in dealing with these issues, walking the line between vendor and compatriot. There are all sorts of great folks out there working with nonprofits, deeply invested in their success, who deal with these issues every day. We periodically seek them out, and often find solace commiserating over beers.

But we also share triumphs when our work makes a difference, and people’s lives are a little bit better because of it. Plus, there’s the added benefit of basking in the reflected glory of the long list of great nonprofits we get to associate with–people doing the daily work on the ground, and making the world a better place. That’s what it’s all about when you’re part of a movement, and not just a consultant.