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 Smart Home

Years ago, sophisticated home automation seemed like an unattainable reality without the help of an electrician, networking expert, or a nerdy friend. The reality is that the market has a lot of options to smarten up your home. They range from the plug and play to flip-the-breaker installs.

A lot of these items come with different degrees of sticker shock. The configuration I am going to outline below was accumulated over many months, out of need and curiosity. When my wife and I bought a house earlier this year, it became clear that while not essential, these tweaks could significantly improve our quality of life. Onward!

Getting Started with Climate Control & Security

When we bought our home in May 2020, the first upgrade was swapping out the old Honeywell thermostat to a Google Nest Learning Thermostat. The home was unoccupied and temperatures in Central Texas were rising. I figured if I was going to be doing some form of pre-move manual labor, the thermostat was critical to cool off the house before I got there. Dropping the temps on moving day made the t-stat worth it.

As we settled into the new home, we realized that our bedroom ran hot at night. Our house is made of brick and gets sun on three sides. To solve this we put a Google Nest Temperature Sensor in the bedroom. During the day, I’ve got Nest prioritizing the hallway temperature, and overnight I’ve got the bedroom sensor controlling the system.

To round out our Nest install, I added two Google Nest Outdoor Cameras and a Nest Doorbell. I found this video really helpful when installing my cameras. With my Google Nest configuration set up to my liking, I moved on to the front door.

My three beautiful nieces live 500 feet away and often will come over to swim in our pool. I began to see a trend forming of us running through the house, dripping water, having to unlock or lock the front door. It became clear that, like the Nest Thermostat, a new August Wi-Fi Smart Lock would quickly pay for itself.

Keeping the Lawn Green

In Central Texas, your Bermuda grass can quickly go from green to white/yellow/brown if you’re not careful. Our new home came with a Hunter X-Core manual sprinkler controller. Between a broken dial and not knowing if the sprinklers were actually coming on at 5 am, I was ready for something a little nicer. Enter the Hunter Hydrawise WiFi-enabled controller. It’s got a great app to set up your programs and read reports on actual watering.

Network Coverage & IoT

As I began accumulating smart home devices, It was clear that my AT&T router wasn’t going to consistently support the diversity of devices both on the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz. For those unfamiliar with the differences, Netgear sums it up well: 

The 2.4 GHz band provides coverage at a longer range but transmits data at slower speeds. The 5 GHz band provides less coverage but transmits data at faster speeds. The range is lower in the 5 GHz band because higher frequencies cannot penetrate solid objects, such as walls and floors.

As I began to flirt with the idea of upgrading my home network, I was quickly pointed in the direction of Unifi.

With a little bit of false confidence and a few hundred feet of cat6 cable, I began planning my wireless access point (WAP) plan. This was prior to Cardi B. ruining that acronym forever.

I decided to install two Ubiquiti Networks Unifi 802.11ac Dual-Radio PRO Access Point (UAP-AC-PRO-US) in the house. One in the hallway, visible from most of the large interior rooms in the house, and one on the back porch, ensuring full coverage over the pool and patio.

Once I had installed these two WAPs, I identified an opportunity to fill in the front part of the house by adding a Unifi Beacon HD Access Point.

In all, this setup has proven able to support all of my devices. One critical step is to turn off the internal WiFi in your cable modem as these are doing a much better job.

Lights. Cameras. Apple HomeKit.

Having done everything prior and paying the related credit card charges, I was ready to put a cherry on top of my smart home with some smart light switches. 

At my day job, I oversee commercial office space facilities, among other things. A couple of years ago, I was introduced to the Lutron Vive product line. It is an incredibly flexible solution in an environment with 100+ switches. The residential application, Lutron Caseta, is total overkill that is well worth the price of admission.

As with the rest of my smart home devices, I started with solving a problem before moving to non-essential purchases. First up was getting my Lutron Smart Start Kit to lay the foundation for what was to come.

With my Lutron environment established, I was free to begin expanding as I saw fit. My priorities were as follows:

• Turn exterior lights on at sunset; Turn off at sunrise

• Turn select interior lights on upon arriving at home

• Create scenes based on time of day or event

With this strategy in mind, I was able to use the Lutron app and Apple HomeKit to create some slick automation. When my wife or I arrive home, certain lights come on to welcome us. When we both leave, all of the lights shut off, with the exception of the exterior lights.

Along with this home occupancy logic, I have also programmed a few scenes in Apple HomeKit: 

• Party City: All common area lights up to 100%

• Relax: 7-9 pm lighting down to 30%

• Max Chill: Most lights off, one at 20%

• Leave Home/Goodnight: All lights off, except front exterior. (They run on Lutron sunrise/sunset schedule)

• Fans On: Sometimes the smoke detectors go off or the humidity level in the house rises, this quickly circulates air with the HVAC fan on and ceiling fans spinning.

Utilizing Apple HomeKit, I am able to have the majority of my products under one control panel. There are times when I will use a native app, such as the Lutron sunrise/sunset integration. There has also been one instance where I had to buy something to connect two devices that didn’t want to play nice together: Google Nest & Apple HomeKit. Of course, these two would not want to have their products integrate. Luckily, there is an aftermarket bridge that warms up this cold war and connects Nest to HomeKit. The Starling Home Hub plugs in to your network switch and with a quick configuration connects all the devices seamlessly.

All Projects Have a Finish Line

As I mentioned earlier, this didn’t happen overnight, nor do I feel a sense of completion. I still have light switches I would like to switch to Lutron, devices I could tell Alexa to control, and ways to turn our app-controlled devices into more passive experiences through motion detectors and geofencing.

For the holidays, I received two MyQ Smart Garage Door Openers and some Wemo Smart Outlets, both indoor and outdoor. With these recent additions, I am nearly done with my smart home conversion.

I hope this narrative inspires you to finally start your smart home project and align with a product line. In a crowded market, it’s important to make smart decisions early on before finding yourself with multiple brands of smart home products.

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.

Creating opportunity through self-service

On January 1st, I assumed the role of YNPN-NYC Board Chair. It has been a great first month, taking a 35,000-foot view of the chapter and its operations.

One of the value-adds of YNPN-NYC in the past has been a job board. Previously, anyone could post, just so long as they were a member. This was a great funnel to grow membership, engender community, and create a cycle of brand awareness and retention among employer and employee.

At the start of the year, our Board roster was a little light. Part of the “steep” learning curves of assuming my role, has been to figure out band-aids to carry the organization until we’re whole again.

As I set out to reimagine some of our tech infrastructure, including how we billed membership dues, the job board was a priority to sort out. At the very least, YNPN-NYC must continue to support the nonprofit community which we aim to serve in this capacity.

Through a bit of googling, and some luck, I stumbled upon JobBoard.io. It’s a turnkey solution that allows employers post jobs, candidates to find employers, and board operators to collect a fee for the service. For YNPN-NYC, this is found money around-the-clock.

What really sold me on the platform beyond the customer service from its CEO was that it’s inherently self-service was and we could brand it. Now, jobs.ynpn.nyc is the place to start your nonprofit career in New York City.

Sure, there are other big names out there. How cool would it be, though, to start a job interview talking about your mutual connection through YNPN-NYC and doing good in NYC.

Since the implementation of the new job board, we’ve had 36 jobs posted. Postings begin at $25 for a 30-day listing. Employers have the option of featuring the post for an additional $25. To celebrate, the launch of the board, I utilized the embedded couponing functionality. Until the end of the month, you can save 25% by using coupon code “launch” at checkout.

I’ve enjoyed watching the jobs come through during the work day. I have an integration through Zapier that posts to my Slack channel in real-time. There’s another automation that tweets new job postings to @ynpnnyc.

Thus far, postings have translated into $820 in found revenue for the organization that will be reinvested into expanding our reach and programming for members.

I’ve learned from this experience that sometimes the best way to capitalize on opportunity is to put it in the hands of the person on the other end of the transaction.

Migrating your membership organization to a new payment provider

When I took over YNPN-NYC earlier this month as Board Chair, I immediately hit the ground running with a new recurring payment provider, Recurly.

At some point in 2015, I became a client of a SaaS company using Recurly to manage their billing. I was getting a discount from them, which made my experience with the platform all the more interesting.

In the past, YNPN-NYC managed recurring membership dues with PayPal. After a site redesign, a new member was processed via SquareSpace purchase with a Mailchimp auto-subscribe. It was a seamless transition and kept you on the site. To be honest, I wasn’t involved back when PayPal was the primary payment solution.

So, here we are at the end of 2015 with members in low triple digits recurring annually on PayPal and a few hundred with SquareSpace purchased memberships.

With this great divide, I knew I would need something that would be self-managing, with a low barrier to entry. It also had to be elegant by today's standards. I didn’t know a ton about Recurly, but I knew I had to test it.

What sold me on Recurly was the ecommerce-like nature of it. Customers come, checkout, and then are processed annually. It’s blatantly simple.

Another huge sell was the twice daily sync of active subscriptions with Mailchimp. I wouldn’t have to manually export. Even if this integration wasn’t built in, I could have used Zapier. The icing on the cake is that if someone cancels their membership, it removes them from the list.

Implementation

I recently launched a new CRM for Stupid Cancer. With the CRM, I took the approach of “today is the first-day” type of mentality. I knew I may be disrupting things for legacy members, but that new leads would be unaffected. My hunch was correct.

Once our Recurly account was set up (About a 15–30 minute process of fully customizing and setting up payment processor), I pulled down the old membership form.

After I was confident it was set up correct, I waited for the new members to show up. Luckily, a launch in January meant that I could leverage people's resolutions with clever marketing.

Once the process was set and I saw how the Mailchimp sync worked, I compiled all of the active legacy members with their name, email, and anniversary date. I uploaded them into this new “active member” list.

Migrating Legacy Members

One important note about Recurly is that it adds two private fields to Mailchimp. Since we offer one plan, these fields are always populated with the same info. With a quick sort on MC, I can see who is a new 2016 member and who isn’t.

Using Mailchimp segmentation, I can email the people whose Recurly fields are blank with an anniversary before the date of that communication. This is how I figure out which members are expired within the new configuration. I haven’t decided how many times legacy/non-Recurly members will receive a renewal prompt before I migrate them to the non-member list.

Obviously, it’s in my interest recapture as many of these legacy members as possible. For some, they may not even realize their membership has lapsed. Using coupon codes, I can spice it up a little bit and play around with how much of a discount it takes to have people come back aboard as a member. Since people move or transition careers, it’s no surprise that we won’t have 100% return. That’s not a realistic goal, anyway.

Customer Service

The best part about Recurly is the self-managing nature of it. As a consumer, subscriber, member, human, I want to be in control of what’s going on, especially when it comes to paying for things. Why shouldn’t we grant the same to our members?

Recurly sends an email 7 days prior to a member's anniversary letting them know in one week they will be billed. A member then has the option to cancel, update billing, or sit back and let it happen. As I mentioned earlier, if they cancel, they will be removed from the Mailchimp list.

If their billing fails, magic within Recurly will try to resolve an issue such as a bad expiration date without automatically reaching out to the subscriber. If Recurly is unable to automatically sort it out, subscribers will receive a few nudges.

Moving Forward

Migrating an entire membership base can seem like a daunting experience. As with most things in my day-to-day life, I try to approach a problem and see if there is a modern solution for it.

While it is widely known that the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one, it can also be costly to spend time on the things that Recurly will handle for me.

Reception

The move to Recurly has been a really great one for the organization. We've had over 75 members sign up in the first 18 days.

Non-Profits: Technology is The Biggest Donation You Aren’t Leveraging

Any non-profit COO or CTO will tell you that finding the technology that appropriately addresses their needs is tough to come by. The existing platforms with the non-profit in mind often cost upwards of $25,000 to engage. There are several problems with this situation. First, it is impossible to know that a CRM/donor database/360° fundraising platform will meet your needs long-term. Second, these platforms will lock you in for a year at least, and the much-needed updates will never come. Lastly, these platforms are insular systems without API or any means of connecting them to other solutions. (San Francisco, feel free to help us out here.)

I’m lucky to work in a non-profit vertical that spans from the tiny side-project to the multi-million dollar behemoth fundraising machine. In a space where we’re all working towards the same goal, it’s interesting how organizations leverage technology to carry out their mission.

Over the past six years at Stupid Cancer, we have stopped and started with so many different platforms my staff now cringes any time I tell them I’ve found something new. It’s true that I’ve probably worn out my welcome by having them help me test new things, but old habits die hard. When it was just Matthew and myself, we had to compensate for the lack of staff. It was the wild west of free trial exploration, and I learned a lot from it.

As we’ve grown over the past few years and hired staff to help us, my instinct remains to take a tech-forward approach.

I am also a big believer in putting automated systems in place where appropriate and removing the human element. There is no reason to try to do things better than computers. I see it way too often in this community of limited resources. It will only reduce your capacity for upward growth.

We recently did an internal exercise where we measured how much time each staff member spent on their respective duties. While they mostly landed as we thought they would, there were some instances where outside forces were pulling us away from getting out jobs done. In any company — especially a growing one – this is bound to happen. Ultimately, we took a look at the results and have begun to figure out how to mitigate these distractions by adding articles to our Zendesk FAQ, for example.

In this world of highly scrutinized non-profit budgets, there is so much time and money that can be saved by utilizing low-cost platforms like Zapier or IFTTT (Which doesn’t cost anything at all). I actually find most SaaS-based companies are willing to give deep discounts just based on your merit.

Google and Slack are two examples of companies that reward 501(c)(3) organizations with a lifetime subscription to their platform for free. If a platform doesn’t offer free or discounted services, offer to create compelling content for them that will be mutually beneficial.

We recently received a lovely donation from a platform we had used in the past that was in transition. The temporary separation was a mutual agreement, as they changed their core product offering. When the dust settled on their end, we jumped right in line to sign up.

As the maturation of Stupid Cancer continues from a tiny startup non-profit to million dollar organization, I remain vigilant in making sure we stay nimble and unburdened by the unnecessary.

Drinking from the Data Firehose

When I started with Stupid Cancer in late 2009, the organization had just invested in a SugarCRM database to manage relationships. I had used pharmacy management software since ’02 in my former life as a Pharmacy Tech, so I was familiar with the core functionality. SC had just hired a dev company and spent a considerable amount of money on what was then a worthwhile investment.

Being new to the organization, I didn’t want to rock the boat by accelerating development in ways I knew it could go. I also knew that at any given moment something could happen that would result in some kind of database related disaster. I didn’t have the keys to back up the database regularly. I probably didn’t think back then that I should have been.

Long story short, our self-hosted CRM wasn’t the right fit. We could have made that instance of Sugar work for us, but it was kind of doomed from the start. Before long, we landed on Mailchimp and our Sugar lead forms were replaced by Mailchimp signups. Our contacts became more valuable as subscribers and their journey with us carried on as such.

In 2011/2012, we began to see an uptick in traction across the board due to a corporate rebrand. Suddenly, our lists were growing. In March 2012, we launched an online store and began down an interesting e-commerce journey. All of a sudden, we had rich customer data. For the first time in organizational history, we had an influx of physical addresses. We had real people, spending money and willingly giving us data.

Mailchimp, along with Volusion, were our first two SaaS engagements. We were able to negotiate non-profit pricing which was in the 20–25% off range or sometimes free.

Very quickly, we faced another dilemma. Our email marketing platform and online store weren’t communicating with one another. Luckily, I caught wind of a cloud connector called Kevy. Up until this past summer, Kevy functioned solely as an integration platform. It moved large amounts of data from one cloud-hosted platform to another via API. They have since discontinued their integration service to focus on email marketing. We look forward to utilizing their service at the end of our current ESP contract.

Before we knew it, we were generating a ton of rich data every single day, from all sides. So much so, we couldn’t keep up with it. We had analytics and longitudinal information but were only in a position to glance at it and move on. With a small staff, there was no sound way to compile reports and make informed decisions, for the most part, other than from 35,000 feet up.

Last Summer, Slack was brought to market and changed everything for Stupid Cancer, and team communication everywhere.

Slack isn’t the first team communications platform that our organization has ever used. We were loyal users of Yammer, before it was acquired by Microsoft and the platform didn’t keep up with our needs. We put our best effort into Bitrix24, which only lasted until we caught wind of Slack.

Slack was new and interesting. It came with a lot of bells and whistles that we didn’t know we needed. Slack pointed me in the direction of Zapier, an integrations company. By this point, I had already experimented with IFTTT (If this, then that). Zapier connected Slack with platforms we didn’t even know it could.

Slack became the soul of Stupid Cancer overnight.

A year ago, I wrote this post about Slack. Since then, Slack has helped us refine a lot of our internal processes by making us take a tech-first approach. Throughout our work day, we track projects, finances, social media, customer service, customer feedback, event registration, and more.

After 7 years of creating data, we’re relaunching a traditional CRM on theBase platform. Using the same workflows that we have with Slack, we’ll be able to focus less on the minutiae and have a tool that serves us well.

Case Study: How Stupid Cancer manages all the moving parts with Klipfolio Dashboard

I recently sat down with Klipfolio to chat about how Stupid Cancer uses their service.  This is a repost.

What is Stupid Cancer?

Kenny Kane: Stupid Cancer is a not-for-profit organization that provides a support network for young adults affected by cancer. When our founder, Matthew Zachary, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1995, he realized that there were actually very few resources available to the 15-35 age category. Stupid Cancer was founded in 2007 to address this gap, and has grown to include a vast support network that includes local meet ups, online forums, social networks and even an online radio show.

What is your role with the organization?

KK: I was Matthew's 2nd intern and 1st employee. Back then, we were called "I'm Too Young For This!" but decided to adopt one of our campaign taglines, "Stupid Cancer." I am a Co-Founder and Director of Social Media, eCommerce and Supply Chain.

Can you tell us a little bit about your data and reporting needs?

KK: There are a lot of moving parts here at Stupid Cancer. We have a large social footprint and need to track data from our various revenue channels and supply chain. For us, it's about centralizing data from all these channels into one place.

How are you using Klipfolio?

KK: Right now, I have about 8 or 9 tabs on my dashboard. I use Klipfolio to bring all the data together in one place, which makes it convenient when I'm talking to our board of directors and need to rattle off lots of facts and figures. Klipfolio saves me a lot of time and energy when I'm preparing for meetings and it's definitely nice to have it 24/7.

Could you tell us a bit about the metrics you are tracking on your dashboard?

KK: My financial tab tracks donations, revenue vs expenses, and campaign performance, while my store tab tracks revenue by month, shipping costs, number of order shipped by state and I have a chart that tracks sales tax and shipping costs. My operations and social tabs show metrics like number of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram followers, mail list subscribers, web visitors, and I even have a snapshot taken from Zendesk that shows opened and closed issues, as well as customer feedback.

My conference tab (pictured below) tracks the number of attendees to conferences over the past 4 years – it's actually really cool to see the growth of the conference. And the outreach tab tracks the literature we publish and send out to hospitals and shows data such as number sent, where they are sent to, and the frequency of sends.

Why Klipfolio?

KK: After checking out another solution, a friend referred me to Klipfolio. When I found out it was $20/mth, I didn't think it was real. *Laughs*

I have a basic knowledge of XML and what I like to call web accessible data sources. I've had a lot of fun setting up my dashboard and learning about the capabilities of the platform.

How has your experience been with Klipfolio staff?

KK: Yvonne is the best. Ever. She was absolutely instrumental in helping set up the dashboard and answering any questions I had.

What features would you like to see in the future?

KK: I'd love to see more data sources. I've definitely tweeted to Klipfolio to introduce you to services that I use. We'd definitely love to set up an integration with SoundCloud to get data about radio show attendees.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to a team preparing to deploy their own dashboard?

KK: Think of who you're sharing the dashboard with. A dashboard is only as good as the audience it's intended for. With all the information on my dashboard, I could pull open 8 or 9 chrome tabs in my browser and flip through them to get the same information. But think of how impressive it is to open the dashboard and have all your data flash, update and populate.

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.