The Chief Automation Officer

I signed up for Zapier on March 5, 2014. I was Chief Operating Officer at Stupid Cancer at the time. Back then, I couldn't tell you what a cloud computing stack was, but I had one, and Zapier unlocked many doors and flipped on many light switches for me, professionally.

Three months after joining Zapier, Slack hit the market, and I was off to the races with automation. Suddenly every business data point was funneling into Slack as it quickly became the brain of Stupid Cancer. I have blogged in the past about Slack, so I will avoid doing that here. As a result, Slack dinged all day long at Stupid Cancer, and it still does in my various current roles.

When Wade Foster, Zapier CEO, posted this on LinkedIn, I felt seen:

Without realizing it, I have spent most of the past decade becoming a well-tuned Chief Automation Officer. It’s subtly been the hallmark of my career.

One of my favorite byproducts of automation is just how amazed people are at the very nature of it. There is little budget or margin of error for trying things out in the nonprofit world, especially with fundraising tools. Most fundraising platforms are awful and siphon much-needed funds out of charities to line their pockets. They would argue that they make it possible for nonprofits to be successful, and that's a debate I would love to have. I digress. People are amazed when you connect multiple apps, and data moves around 24/7.

With Zapier, we could suddenly do more than our out-of-the-box fundraising platform could do alone. I was not left wanting seven features and having to settle for four. I could have it all.

• I didn't need to export donors and import them into Mailchimp.

• I didn't need to watch my email for Stripe donations; I could get a Slack notification.

• I didn't need to create a to-do list task manually; Zapier took care of it.

My pivot to the private sector has created more meaningful automation opportunities in recent years. Now operating a membership-based company, my automation is focused on moving people through different states, such as lead, contact, active member, and former member. These states affect how we interact with you and your place in our cloud stack.

I wish I could say I spent a lot of time making flow charts and thinking about the end-to-end journey of my data. The reality, though, is most of my Zaps are born out of acute necessity and team inspiration. Perhaps one day, I’ll start keeping notes.

One consideration when running through the paces of creating automation is where Zapier fits alongside an app’s internal workflow system. Zoho Campaigns comes to mind in this example. I might use Zapier to get you from Facebook Leads to a Zoho Campaigns Mailing list with additional information. Still, I will let Zoho Campaigns read your contact record and qualify you for an email workflow. Keeping track of these relationships is essential so you don’t create loops or unforeseen automatic enrollment.

Automation can be daunting if you don’t know where to start. Services like Upwork have professionals for hire on a short-term basis to get you started. Once you start seeing what’s possible and connecting the dots between your workflows and cloud apps, you’ll get back those wasted hours doing things manually.

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Further reading:

• The emergence of the chief automation officer

• Chief Automation Officers Are The Answer … But What Is The Question?

My Supercharged Email Management Strategy

Managing multiple email inboxes has become all too real in 2019: personal email, school email, work email, your project, your other project. For years, the Gmail app was my go-to. Flipping between inboxes seemed like the best there ever could be. The thought of a native app with multiple logged-in email accounts plus efficiency?

No way.

2015 said “yes way,” in a big way, when Spark hit the app store and the next iteration of email management was finally here for both mobile and desktop. At long last, something intuitive that wasn’t the Apple Mail app. (Disclaimer: I’ve never used it. It gives me anxiety.)

Spark makes it easy to start, with a great onboarding experience to add your email accounts. Once complete, you’ll notice the emails you just saw in your other mail app roll in. This is when panic will set in, and you realize you should have never signed up for that daily horoscope newsletter ten years ago.

Fear not; I am about to break down Spark into a few easy, actionable steps to get going and make sense of the private email hell you’ve created for yourself.

Start by focusing on the core features

1. Signatures

2. Smart vs Classic inbox

3. Looking at all your emails vs sorting by inbox

4. Short and long swipes on mobile

5. Snoozing emails

1) Signatures

Every good email author needs a really cool signature, right? Right. Once you’ve added all your accounts, go in and create the variations of your signature.

Here is what that experience looks like:

To reiterate, you can create multiple signatures for multiple accounts. When replying, Spark knows which signature to add to the bottom of which email. It enables you to roll through emails like a champ without having to mess with how you sign the email.

2) Smart vs Classic inbox

Sometimes when you are presented with more than one option in life, it can make it hard to settle on just one, right? Recently, this was a usability issue in Spark with Smart vs Classic inbox. It was less than stellar to flip between the two, then they introduced a really nice on/off toggle.

Smart inbox off – Showing all emails

Smart inbox on – Showing emails that have been seen at the top. Would normally be broken into important, notifications (aka promotions), and then seen. At the time of writing this, I don’t have any new emails.

This is a super helpful mobile experience for when you’ve just woken up, come out of a long meeting, or any other time you haven’t looked at your email and are looking to cut through the fat.

3) Looking at all your emails vs. sorting by inbox

Before you get overwhelmed thinking you’ll be bombarded by all your emails, you can look at them in their entirety (all of your emails, from all accounts) or by individual accounts. This is accomplished by using the menu on the left side. It’s a helpful mechanism to focus on whichever headspace you’re in.

4) Short and long swipes on mobile

I can dominate my email on mobile with short and long left and right swipes. Here is how I have them set.

5) Snoozing emails

This is my favorite part of Spark and my motivation to share this information with you. Snoozing emails has become the key to my success as an adult who sends emails.

Whether you’re on mobile or desktop, snoozing could not be more simple. When I am at my computer, I use my ⌘+D shortcut, which instantly pulls up a similar pop up to the one below.

When snoozing emails on my phone, I am presented with the question of when I want to see the email again.

Snoozing is perfect for situations where the ball is in someone else’s court and it requires a follow up to see if the action happened and what the outcome was.

Scenario A: If I send a request out and can wait until the next day to hear back, I immediately snooze the email for tomorrow morning.

Scenario B: If I get an email that is important but not more important than what I’m doing in a given moment, I will likely snooze it for a few hours or until 6 pm when I have completed my most important tasks, emails have slowed down, and I can think about something with a clear head.

Scenario C: If I get an email that I need to follow up on, but it’s not pressing, I will snooze it until the weekend.

Scenario D: Snoozing is also great for things that aren’t relevant for days or weeks. Those emails that start out so well-intended by saying “Just putting this on your radar…”

Sorry, radar is full.

Here is how my day unfolds

7 am – Smart inbox toggle on, swiping to quickly archive junk mail.

9:30 am – Emails prioritized by immediate action, snoozing for 2 hours later, the evening, the next day, Saturday, or next Monday. Occasionally, I set a date/time for emails to reappear in the distant future. (Helpful for those “let’s touch base in a month” emails.)

10 am – Prior day snoozed emails roll in.

Mid-day – Less important morning emails reappear and are dealt with.

6 pm – Lowest priority emails roll in.

Evening – Inbox zero!

That’s it. That is my email secret sauce which keeps me rolling fast through newsletters, promotions, and solicitations right on to the real emails.

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Ready to get started with Spark and become the master of your own email destiny?

Nurture Fundraisers Using CauseVox, Zapier, and ConvertKit

Fundraising is a crucial part of a non-profits existence. The biggest opportunity for a non-profit is leveraging its community to fundraise on its behalf. The hardest part is maintaining the attention of community members and empowering them to feel confident in their efforts.

For a year now, I've been using CauseVox as my primary fundraising tool for the Testicular Cancer Foundation. I really enjoy CauseVox because it puts a lot of the controls on the admin side, rather than having to go through an account manager or some other contact on the provider side.

Exploring CauseVox Zaps on Zapier

About 6 months ago, CauseVox began teasing their Zapier beta integration. As a Zapier lover and full-blown nerd, I'd been waiting for the integration to go live to see what kind of pathways I would have access related to fundraisers. A few weeks ago, the news came through that the integration was live. Excitement ensued.

The CauseVox options are simple and to the point. Did we A) Get a new fundraiser or B) Get a new donation?

With this info, I can do a lot of cool things.

One of the main features that really (I mean really) expensive fundraising platforms up-charge for is communicating with fundraisers within the platform. Campaign updates, direct emails, drip emails, etc. There's a ton of options.

My first Zap using CauseVox is to bridge the gap between a lack of communicating with fundraisers and using an email marketing platform I live in all day long, ConvertKit.

Using ConvertKit

With ConvertKit, I can create drip email sequences to walk my fundraisers along a series of emails that convey important information, emotion, and reinforce why they are so important to our organization. (Fundraisers...if you are reading this, we love you!)

CauseVox has the ability to send a welcome email, which is fantastic. I haven't yet decided if I will keep this email active or send them all to ConvertKit for the entire email series. (On one hand, it's a safe bet that the email will always send, but on the other hand, I would love to have the open rate and click metrics that ConvertKit provides.)

Creating a Drip Email Sequence

Currently, our email series is broken up like this:

Email 1: Welcome to Fundraising

Email 2: More about CauseVox and tactical points around fundraising (includes link to proprietary PDF about fundraising)

Email 3: Where the money goes / why this is so important

Final Thoughts

I am curious to see how the response is to our new series of emails. With all communications, the last thing you want to do is be over communicative and have someone lose interest entirely. By looking at my ConvertKit open and click rates, I'll see which emails are most effective and which need some fine tuning.

3 Automations to Make Year-End Fundraising a Breeze

It's that time again: year-end fundraising and the race to December 31st. While this can be the most wonderful time of the year, it's also the most tedious, data-intensive, drive-you-to-drink time of the year. Unless you have the right tools in place.

Luckily, there are options when it comes to funneling all the data your donors are generating. Enter, Zapier automations.

If you're unfamiliar, Zapier is a subscription service that connects different online apps to one another using API and other means. With a few simple clicks, you can connect the majority (read: relevant) of your apps and be on your way.

The Approach

For me, architecting my Zapier arsenal is a problem-first approach. What do I need in the future and where do I need it?

Let me pause here and give you a word of caution. With too much automation, you can enter a data redundancy wormhole, wherein you have exhausted your monthly Zap limit and reached the task limit. If you have no idea what I am talking about, great. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will be at 80% of your task limit in no time.

Without further suspense, here is my list of essential automations to get from here to listening to U2 on January 1st.

Stripe to Slack

Stripe is currently my primary payment gateway. Using the direct Slack integration, I send payment success, payment fail, and daily deposit information into an #incoming-money channel. On the Zapier side, I send customer and transaction metadata to the same channel. It's duplicative, but helpful for providing donation context in the moment. The input and output looks something like this:

If I donate $5, there will be an #incoming-money message that says "Kenny Kane (kennykane@gmail.com) has donated $5 to campaign x."

By including the customer email field in my Zap, I can very quickly send a new email, instantly, from Slack to thank or learn more about them. I also use it to look them up on social media and try to get background info on them. I typically do this for donations larger than $250. If it's an interesting email domain, I will do it for less.

Stripe to Wunderlist

One of the places you can set yourself up for failure the most in donor cultivation is the process of thanking them. For me, a Slack notification can fly by and be lost forever. To mitigate this problem, I set up a handy insta-to-do list.

Using a similar formula to my Slack message, I create a new Wunderlist task for each successful Stripe transaction. At certain time intervals (instantly – 24 hours), I check my 'Donor Thank You' Wunderlist and clear out the donations less than a certain amount. From there, I prioritize biggest donations first. This integration helps me sort through the madness of my donation notification emails, Slack alerts, and any kind of reports Stripe might give me.

Stripe to Google Sheets

I use Google Sheets to create a running table of all donations. This is helpful in running some quick analytics around donations and drawing conclusions without digging through information from multiple sources.

As you may know/come to find out, things break and I don't expect this integration to work 100% of the time. If I am creating any sort of enduring report, I would go right to Stripe for an export.

In Conclusion

The year-end season of giving can be a noisy time. By leveraging the backend APIs of your platforms, you can create a nice system of checks and balances to ensure you won't have incomplete reports, or a donor who feels like they don't matter.

These are just 3 quick automations. If you were looking to get really automated, you could use Zapier's (relatively) new multi-step Zaps to access existing information and update it, such as adding lines to your CRM.

Good luck!

ConvertKit Makes Me a Better Non-Profit CEO

What makes a good marketing email? For years, I thought it was a combination of colors and images, font types and social icons. I remember when Mailchimp released their drag and drop editor in November 2012 and everything changed for the amazing.

Four years later, I find myself running away from what I once worked on so hard on. Sending flashy emails seeking to dazzle constituents. Don’t get me wrong, I still use said editor and send branded emails, but it is my belief we’re on the verge of a new communication style in the non-profit sector that compliments the main email list.

Last year, I stumbled upon Authority & Nathan Barry and immediately went down this author, creator, entrepreneur rabbit hole. (Shout out to Nathan, Paul, Jason et al) While entrenched in Nathan’s drip email sequence about his book, I found myself looking forward to the next email from him. It was a non-annoying batch of emails that added value to my inbox every few days. What I didn’t realize was that he was actually selling me on his product, ConvertKit.

ConvertKit strips away the fancy drag and drop editor and provides you with the ability to send personalized plain-text emails, fast. Gone are the days of the bulk BCC, replaced with the ability to let my network decide on how they want to engage with me, and the organization I run.

With ConvertKit, I can tag subscribers by donation tiers, campaign affiliation, etc. What’s more, I can change up who the email comes from quickly. If I want to send the email from a fellow staff member or Board Member, it’s a two second switch before the email goes out.

What I really love about ConvertKit is that I can create links within the email that allow people to tag themselves using automations. In the past, a subscriber would have to visit a preference page to do what they can now do right from their inbox. By giving people options on what they want to hear about on the front end, I’m reducing the number of people who might go right for the unsubscribe link in the footer. If they do unsubscribe, that’s fine. "Engage or die."

Uncle Ben said “With great power comes great responsibility.” He’s right. As your ConvertKit database grows in size, you have to maintain strict segmentation of messages and resist the urge to send to everyone at once. That’s what your other list is for.

Since implementing ConvertKit, I’ve seen a ton of conversion and interest from my outbound emails. With the built in analytics, I can see who is opening my emails and interacting with them. These insights are helpful when knowing which donors to pursue, or volunteers to activate. As time progresses, I am discovering new and exciting ways to incorporate ConvertKit into my day to day. With CK starting at $29/month, I can’t help but think back to all of the Salesforce add-ons, priced astronomically, to achieve something similar.

Productivity Apps that distract me all day long

I’m always fascinated when I read what apps people use on a regular basis in different industries. Here is my list:

1. Sunrise Calendar I’ve been using Sunrise for almost two years and it has really changed everything, starting from the moment I wake up. Honestly, though. The email digest in the morning is fantastic and gives me an idea of what I’m up against. I have several calendars shared with me, which I hide on the desktop and mobile app. I get it all in the email which limits alerts.

2. Slack Slack, my Slack. If you’re reading this, I’m preaching to the choir. Maybe we could have a brief discussion below on how terrible the Ryver ads are on Twitter.

3. Trello Organized. Elegant. Slack integrated. Nuff said.

4. Calendly I wear a lot of hats. Calendly is the first solution that lets me put scheduling time in the hands of the other person. Saves so much time and is great for new clients.

5. Appear.in Love Google Hangouts but hate needing to login and invite someone with a Google account? Try this. It’s lovely.

6. Curated.co Curated.co is a email service provider that helps you build elegant, roundup emails. You can use a submit stories via email or bookmarklet. Compile collected stories for distribution at will. (Currently getting 50% open rates consistently with the list we’ve built.) Check it out

7. TripIt Helping me organize travel plans for years. Also has tracking metrics on distance and what not. Forward your itineraries to plans@tripit.com to get started.

8. Zapier Wade and his team have helped me professionally in ways they will never know. Zapier is the ultimate GSD app.

9. IFTTT If This Then That could be viewed as a competitor of Zapier, but it’s more of a Coke and Pepsi relationship. They are both super helpful.

10. LinkedIn

11. iDoneThis This quirky app has changed things at Stupid Cancer. With a cool Slack integration, employees can type /done xyz and have it logged. IDT pings you at 9am and 5pm with what’s happened recently among the staff in a email digest format.

12. Mint Hit recommend if checking Mint to see how little money you have is a favorite pastime.

13. Bigcommerce What’s to say. The only game in town. Love BC. Love the people. Shoutout to Mitchell, Ron, Tracey and everyone else on Medium.

14. Skubana Skubana is an all-in-one cloud management platform for all things e-commerce. It helps me manage my Amazon seller account.

15. Inventory Planner Oleg has built something amazing here. It’s a Bigcommerce bolt on that has helped me more than I would have thought since enlisting the services of a third-party fulfillment company. It’s my window into the warehouse.

16. BaseCRM Base is relatively new for Stupid Cancer but works with Zapier (duh) and helps us funnel everyone into the app. Have it connected with just about every entry point to the organization.

17. Confluence We use Confluence for document retention. I wish we used it more, but we’re a small staff. Adoption has been difficult versus Google Drive or Dropbox.

18. Zendesk Gone are the days of responding to inquiries via shared gmail account. Zendesk helps us help people and fast.

19. Iconosquare Perfect Instagram desktop browsing tool. Love tracking our hashtags on it.

20. SumoMe I just rolled this out on my personal site to grow my list. I am optimistic it will help me beef up my email list.

21. Google Analytics

22. FileZilla Free FTP client. I’ve been using it since I converted to Mac in 2010.

23. BBEdit The perfect notepad/html editor. Keep up the good work.

24. Email Permutator Want to email the CEO of a company but don’t know their email address? Use this.

25. Assembla We built a mobile app with an India-based dev company. We use Assembla to track app functionality requests and bug fixes.

26. SquareSpace

27. iTunes Radio

28. Google Docs

29. Google Forms

30. Google Sheets

31. Facebook

32. Tumblr

33. Twitter

How to Be Less Busy with Slack

The Beginning

In the early days of Stupid Cancer (formerly I'm Too Young For This! Cancer Foundation), we had two employees and a small team of "executive" volunteers. Everyone was spread out around the country, and keeping in touch was critical.

Back then, in 2010, Yammer was the gold standard of the emerging corporate social networks. The design took cues from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It was a great tool that ultimately became the backbone of the organization.

Yammer was eventually acquired by Microsoft, which is when the product kind of lost its way. Upgrades and tweaks became less and less, and the pricing structure also changed, for the worse. We made the decision to migrate platforms in early 2014, to Bitrix24.

Bitrix24 was fine for a time. It had the threaded posts, just like Yammer. It also had tasks, which was new and interesting. The team was underwhelmed by their mobile app, which wasn't as good as Yammer's had been. The search resumed.

Enter Slack

Slack is a communications platform, with an emphasis on chat, search, and integrations. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what I like most about Slack. Perhaps it's a 3-way tie between the custom emoji's, Slackbot responses, and custom loading messages.

I originally intended on making this blog post purely about how I use Slack (IE: Integrations), but I felt it was relevant to discuss where the team was coming from.

The initial kickback was that Slack didn't have the threaded chat view like we were all accustomed to. There was an initial flood of conversations that were disjointed and hard to navigate if you'd been away from Slack for a few hours. Keeping track of ideas was like nailing jello to a wall.

Upon further inspection, it was our Slack naivety that contributed to the mess. We suffered from what I would call "FOCC" (Fear of Creating Channels). Slack channels are essentially chatrooms that live in the left navigation of your Slack app. You can star the important ones, and they get pinned to the top of the list. DM's and private groups live under them.  You can learn more here.

Our watershed moment came when channels went from being just chatrooms, which is how our Internet brain works, to actually being channels. I will list below some of my channels and their purpose. (Keep in mind we're a non-profit that serves young adults with cancer.)

My Slack Channels

#discussion

We have broken conversation-based channels into buckets based on our programs and projects. There is also a channel to list items throughout the week that you'd like to discuss at the weekly staff meeting.

#development

This channel integrates with a Trello board. Any time a change is made on that board, it's reflected in this Slack channel. It's a great way of keeping everyone in the loop on a critical part of our operation.

#rss

I have tried several RSS-feed-based channels. They can be helpful in keeping you up-to-date on your favorite blogs and news sources. I have a channel that syndicates everything we post to our Tumblr, which is a syndication of our Facebook page via IFTTT. (Inception, anyone?)

#incoming-money

This channel is my favorite, for obvious reasons. We have a web store that uses PayPal Pro, and two incoming donation sources that send emails when donations are received. I send information from all three sources to #incoming-money via Zapier.

#outgoing-money

This channel lets the team know when bills have been paid. Using Zapier's email channel, we can capture bill pay notification emails from bill.com or Capitol One and have them post to this channel. It keeps information flowing and helps the finance and ops team in the loop.

#random

This channel syndicates all the inquiries into our Zendesk. It also shows Mailchimp subscribes, unsubscribes, and campaign activity. It should probably be called #customerservice.

#feed-instagram

Another great Zapier fueled channel is our Instagram channel. In this channel, we track images posted on IG with #stupidcancer. It's a great way to source content for our Facebook wall, and see what conversations are happening related to our brand.

#feed-twitter

Just like above, except this channel syndicates all mentions of @StupidCancer.

#feed-reddit

Reddit has an active /r/cancer community. With this RSS integration, we can see what kind of conversations are happening and source content for our FB wall.

#giphy

Slack has a great direct integration with Giphy that I've taken advantage of since we upgraded our Slack plan from free to paid. Once enabled, you can write things like "/giphy blogging" and get an image like this one on the right.

In Closing

This story has a happy ending. Slack has quickly become the pulse of the organization. It's our Death-Star-for-good, making us incredibly efficient. I'm told threaded conversations are in the pipeline, which will make my team members happy.

Making Sense of Business Metrics via Dashboards

If you're in an operations role at your company, chances are you're bombarded with business metrics information all day long. If you're like me, you probably keep multiple tabs open, or have bookmarks that go directly to various report pages. Pie charts, bar graphs, spark lines, gauges, meters, maps, and tables fill your day as you try to make sense of it all.

In a recent strategic planning meeting, my good friend Roni Zeiger referred me to a company called Klipfolio. This wasn't my first time looking at dashboard services, but definitely the first time it made sense. I had previously sat through a demo of Domo at eTail West. While there isn't anything inherently wrong with Domo, for $20 per month per user, Klipfolio is at the price point my NPO budget can afford.

So...where to start, right? In order to get started with building my dashboard, I first had to understand what I wanted to track. Suddenly, the possibilities were endless. I made a mental list:

• Social presence. Facebook insights are relatively easy to connect, and instantly rewarding. Below, you'll see I've created a chart that tracks 3 dimensions of insights: impressions, new likes, and engaged users. This mimics the standard view on Facebook. But hey, you don't have to go there anymore.

• More social presence. I quickly found out that the best part about social media API is that it's rich data and it's reliable. I have several panes on my dashboard that give me two dimensions of any given social platform. For example: Facebook followers and people talking about us; Twitter followers and number of tweets; Mailing list subscribers and open rate.

• Distribution. We have a growing eCommerce store, as well as a literature supply chain that goes out to cancer centers around the country. It's great to visualize which states and countries they're going to, and in what frequency.

• Event attendance. Exactly the same as distribution, but flipped, and with human beings.

• Cash flow. Donations, sponsorships, store revenue. You can do all sorts of fun things from creating thermometer like gauges with goals, as well as pie charts to see how your different campaigns stack up along side each other.

After two months of tinkering, that's where I've landed, but it's not exactly the end of the story. There are a few other aspects of creating your dashboard.

• Audience. Who are you showing this to? In my case, I can drag and drop different panes easily. If you plan on using your dashboard as a tool during a sales pitch, you will definitely need to modify and cater it to each specific meeting. I have also contemplated creating a "read only" version. Luckily, with Klipfolio, you can choose to share different panes with other users. This is great if you have people under you who might need to see only bits and pieces of information rather than everything under the hood.

• Data sources. API, XML, CSV, or JSON? (Who came up with these crazy acronyms, anyway?) In terms of data sources, API is ideal. As I mentioned, social API is up the majority of the time. I do have a pesky data source that is in and out. I really never know if my charts and graphs will populate. XML reports are static, but easy to work with. CSV files are also static, but a bit more customizable for specific reporting purposes. The data source will determine how efficient your dashboard is vs. how much manual updating it will require. Always shoot for API/JSON first.

If you're using a dashboard service or thinking about using one, I'd love to hear what you plan on tracking in the comments below.

Zendesk, a Non-Profit's Dream.

I'm going to generalize and say that most non-profits lack the ability to experiment with their tech infrastructure.  It's not their fault; they're just not as nerdy as Matthew and I. As I write this from my JetBlue gate at San Diego International Airport, I can't help but romanticize about closing tickets.  What I'm referring to is the act of responding to inquiries that get triaged by my staff and me.  It's become second nature.  I know that when I check my iPhone, there could be a Zendesk push notification.

So, what the hell is a Zendesk?

When I first pitched it to my staff, which doubled from 2 to 4 in 2012, I told them it was first a helpdesk ticketing system.  The inquiry comes in, the ticket is created, the notification is pushed, correspondence takes place, and then the ticket is solved.  Secondly, it's a glorious FAQ knowledge base that you can custom-tailor to your needs.  It also includes the ability to have a blog-style dialogue at the bottom of each FAQ page.

Why can't I keep using my free Gmail account that my whole staff shares which catch all of the e-mails that come in?

Chances are you have one or many e-mail addresses that catch your general inquiries.  (I have at least 6.)  You've created aliases, consolidated, and have any and all stray e-mails land in this Google safe haven.  If this sounds like you, you're not exactly doing it wrong, but you could be doing it better...with Zendesk.

If you're not doing this and have some other crazy MacGuyver setup, you may be past saving.

Why do you use it?

As I mentioned, I have at least six e-mails for inquiries to come in through.  Over the years, we've created these e-mail addresses for various purposes in an attempt to do something that I can't remember because it probably didn't work as well as we had thought it would.

Keeping with their mantra, we've been in a zen state since February.  Once we went live with ZD in February, in came the tickets! (YAY) We also realized that there was a lot of spam linked to these accounts, which subsequently drove our new ticket number up and resulted in us having to spend some time pruning.

Here's what I hoped for/expected when I signed up for Zendesk:

• One general inbox to rule them all. A place to keep inquiries and action items that isn't my personal g-mail which coexists with my work e-mail.

• Easily redirecting inquiries based on which bucket they landed in. Gone are the time-sucking e-mail introductions - with one click of a button, I can reassign a ticket to a coworker.

• Serving our constituents faster and more efficiently. Oh yea, those guys.

• Improved customer service. We operate a rapidly growing online store. Questions, comments, exchanges, and the occasional "WHERE IS MY ORDER??????"

• Living, breathing FAQ. Finally, a place to put all of our policies and hopefully reduce the number of inbound FAQs.

Here's the reality:

• You get what you pay for. Zendesk is definitely an investment, but it's worth every penny.

• Use it wisely. Zendesk is a leg of your communications strategy, but it's doesn't come with autopilot. (Do create macros, though!)

• Know your audience. Some people might be turned off by getting a ticket number assigned to them. Others may not understand their role in the process. If they're a legacy member of your organization, they just won't be expecting it. Keep on truckin'.

• Limit your back and forth. I once tried to coordinate a calendar meeting using Zendesk. We wound up going back and forth at least 10 times. There will be times you kick it old school and switch over to e-mail. Zendesk makes it easy to compose right from your dashboard.

• Feedback can be amazing. We've never had a "quick survey" tool. You can enable your Zendesk to send a followup e-mail to rate your customer service. I have mine set to 2 hours after I mark a ticket solved. Negative feedback is the single best gift someone can give you - it helps you do it better the next time.

• Creating FAQs can be both hard and easy. Your FAQs are not the same as people who are just learning about your organization. Crowdsource them and throw yours out of the closest window.

• FAQ pages can be fun. This is not your standard Zendesk front end.

• Accountability. Based on the size of your team, you can see who is kicking Zendesk's butt and who is slacking. You get full metrics about individual response time and the quality of their support.

There's definitely more to the story, and each Zendesk will have its challenges and opportunities.  As with any tech investment, you get out of it what you put in.