A little preparation helps good organizations be great clients

Last year at #17NTC, I met a consultant who reminded me of the dreaded phone call, “Hey, a colleague referred me to you and I want to get a quote for moving to CiviCRM.” Those phone calls are often challenging, as the client hasn’t done much in the way of organizing their needs and helping us help them.

Since that time, the consultant (Betsy Block at B3 Consults) and her partners (Public Profit) released a toolkit funded by the SH Cowell Foundation to help our clients be great clients—the Making Wise Decisions toolkit. The toolkit asks folks to take a brief quiz first and helps nonprofit organizations think about their system readiness. The toolkit itself helps nonprofit organizations organize their materials around:

• Objectives in implementing new system

• Program design

• The program team

• Where their data lives

• Key workflows

Each section of the toolkit comes with a template that a user can download from Google Docs and share back with us.

Besides providing a set of documents that can form the basis of a conversation, the toolkit can spark internal conversations at the organization that prepare staff and board members for participating actively in the engagement.

The folks at B3 Consults and Public Profit have been consulting with clients like ours for years, and with the support of the foundation, they decided the field needed a robust resource to ease the pain of finding a vendor and putting a new system in place. Particularly because we work with the kind of resource-constrained nonprofit organizations that this toolkit targets, CiviCRM consultants can make outstanding use of this tool to help our clients be more ready for a systems implementation.