Your Biggest Software Implementation Risk? It May Not Be What You Think.

My friend called me in a panic. “Our kitchen is half-gutted, and it’s a disaster! Our renovation is going horribly – they put in the wood flooring crooked, they built a wall where we wanted a window, nothing works right, and we’re scheduled to host my daughter’s wedding in two weeks! And we’re contractually obligated to pay them even though this is a mess! But I am pretty happy that our appliances all work really well!”

“Oh, my. How did you pick the firm for the renovation?” I asked.

“We chose the firm that manufactured our appliances. We very carefully considered all the options for appliances, and chose this one. They make amazing equipment! So we didn’t consider anyone else for the renovation project.”

OK, so in real life no one would assume an appliance manufacturer could renovate their kitchen. Yet I am always surprised to find that many organizations that work carefully to consider software options for their mission-critical software system default to using the vendor for implementation services.

And yet, the truth of the matter is that vendors who make great software may or may not have services that are right for your organization. Someone who builds a great appliance doesn’t necessarily know how to stain hardwood. The talent required for developing great software is quite different from the skills required for providing professional services.

I Want Those Hours of My Life Back

When I’m meeting with a room full of fundraisers and the energy level is waning, I have a pretty bullet-proof way to re-energize the group. I ask the seemingly innocuous question – “so tell me, is your monthly reconciliation with Finance pretty straight-forward?” So many stories! Processes, meetings, spreadsheets, copies of checks, highlighters, more meetings, more spreadsheets. (To be fair, the same thing happens if you ask the finance folks about reconciling with the fundraising department – it is a two-way street).

Once you peel away the stories and the angst, there is really a single word left standing: time. Reconciling numbers between your Fundraising and Finance systems takes a lot of time. One of our client non-profits has a lot of experience with this. Philabundance is a charity that helps reduce hunger in the Delaware Valley and has a small but industrious fundraising office. They estimate that in the past they were spending about 12 hours a month on end-of-month reporting and reconciling.

As they don’t have the luxury of a staff-person devoted to reconciliation, these were hours spent not on fundraising, not on furthering or supporting the mission of helping the hungry. These were hours spent trying to get two modern software applications to agree.

What we’ve learned over the years at JCA is that more often than not, the software isn’t flawed – the means of reporting is.

Whisper those three little letters…R.F.M.

Last month, I was fortunate enough to visit Melbourne, Australia, and meet with a number of JCA’s clients there. I spent one afternoon with some of the staff of the Australian Ballet, perhaps Australia’s most renowned dance company. One of the meeting participants was Judy Turner, an accomplished fundraiser who is relatively new to the organization. Given her organization’s great popularity, Judy immediately recognized that her fundraising opportunity was a huge base of prospects in the form of ticket buyers. She also saw her challenge was finding a manageable number of well-qualified donors out of this sea of possibilities. If you only have time to call 500 donors out of a pool of 30,000, don’t you want to spend your time on the best 500?

Judy’s immediate, no-nonsense idea for zeroing in on her top prospects was encapsulated in those three letters she said to me: R.F.M. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary, and refers to a segmentation concept that has been around the direct marketing world for years. The idea is to take a pool of prospects and categorize them based on those three attributes. How recently have they interacted with your organization? How often do they interact? How much do they spend/donate when they interact?