Constituent Experience 101: There is a reality called silos. How should we deal with it in the best interest of our constituents?

We all see it all the time. It is time to put together the annual budget. Or, it is time to update our plans. Each department puts its own plan together and then defends it before the group. At a certain level that makes sense. The question any department leader needs to ask is will this approach serve our constituents best? Is it at odds with the overall constituent experience we are trying to build? To get an enterprise wide constituent investment plan, we may need to do a few things differently. If you have a Chief Constituent Officer, it is their role to make it happen.

The premise here is that constituents are being lost in the hand offs between departments. The constituent walks away thinking do they truly understand my needs? Are they there when I need them? Are they really my partner? If I am a donor and an advocate, how come it doesn’t feel like you know that and treat me differently?

The first thing the Chief Constituent Officer needs to do is make sure they are aligned with the CFO, CIO, CDO and CMO. Investing in a constituent experience plan will take the support of the CFO from the beginning. The CFO will probably welcome an approach that brings together resources for a common goal and eliminates duplicate spending.

If you are the Chief Constituent Officer, you also need to align with the CIO. In this day and age, as a digital nonprofit, nothing happens without the IT department. If you get a jump on aligning with the IT department and their PMO, you will save yourself a lot of time and rework. You will also gain an ally in gaining financial support when the senior team reviews your plans.

Who owns the constituent data in your nonprofit? In some nonprofits that isn’t clear but the CMO will probably be a big stakeholder, along with the Chief Development Officer. If is critical that they both have a seat at the table as you put your plans together. Do they own with your constituent targets, data and plans for improving the experience with you?

One unique role you play as the Chief Constituent Officer is the ability to aggregate intelligence to identify the most important investments. You are the only one who can breathe life into the annual constituent plan. It will take time to bring together the right people to agree on the most pressing constituent challenges and opportunities. Once identified, you can work with senior management to gain agreement to work on solving the issues. Here are a couple of things to look for:

1. Building relationships with priority constituents. Some of these will be obvious like high level donors but others may not.


2. Fixing issues that impede the overall constituent experience.  As the Chief Constituent Officer, you are probably the only one that knows what these are.


3. Points of differentiation and the big bets your nonprofit should make.

Now you are ready to pull an investment budget together. The emphasis here is on investment. It is critical to be able to identify the return these investments will bring to your mission. Now that you have a more integrated view of constituent priorities, you can make your case better. Since you are taking an enterprise wide view, all of the items for investment may actually live in other department budgets. This will drive greater levels of collaboration with your colleagues. As Chief Constituent Officer, you will be providing a great service that is really lacking to your nonprofit. The budgeting process is always where the rubber hits the road. It will help you gain traction and will help you identify roadblocks. It will also help everyone set a few critical priorities since it is highly likely there is a whole lot of extra money sitting around the table.

This type of action on your part as Chief Constituent Officer will help solidify your role as constituent zealot. It will also help everyone see the importance of the overall constituent experience.

What if your nonprofit doesn’t have a Chief Constituent Officer? This is the opportunity for some department (and its leader) to seize the day. It could be the CMO or the CDO. No matter what, someone needs to seize the role.

Crossing the Innovation Chasm. Does CIO stand for Chief Innovation Officer?

Why does the Innovation Chasm exist? As a CIO, you have been charged with protecting your organization’s valuable assets, and with providing a reliable and stable infrastructure. As a result, you have become the “CI-No”:

• “No, we can’t buy that application you saw in an airplane magazine.”


• “No, we can’t have a new Web site built in two weeks.”


• “No, we can’t do that because it will expose our customer data.”

You could be the CI-No because you were the only game in town: if the business wanted access to technology, they had to come through you. That’s not the case anymore. One of the byproducts of the perfect storm is that the business can now access technology directly from the Cloud without your involvement, and without your knowledge. It happens in companies of all sizes, in every industry, regardless of your IT or security stance. When business has access to that technology, it widens the chasm.

IT has to up its game, and smart CIOs are on a path to help the business use technology to innovate both what they do and how they do it.

Here is a great visual of how to align with the CEO.



via Crossing the Innovation Chasm.

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As CIO, is your best business partner the CMO?

When CMOs and CIOs collaborate, the relationship puts the business at a competitive advantage. Technology provides the muscle to make sense of the explosion of data now at our fingertips, as well as the tools that can interpret those results to better discover what customers want. When the CMO and CIO share a focus on the customer, the power to drive business growth is potent.

Better insight from customers can drive serious growth in our companies, at least according to a recent study by IBM of over 1700 CEOs. But today, acquiring and interpreting customer data inherently must involve both the marketing and IT departments. In fact, recent research conducted by the CMO Council, suggests that this process should start with the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO).

One of the key challenges CMOs face is figuring out how to partner with other internal functions. But given that today's CMO is often the main connection between the consumer and the company, a strong relationship with the CIO can allow them to leverage technology to better understand those customers.

And although there are a myriad of analytical tools for generating this kind of information, CMOs are struggling to convert data into consumer insight they can use. A recent study (also from IBM) indicates that more than 70% of CMOs feel they are underprepared to manage the explosion of data and "lack true insight."

With this in mind, there is a growing need to identify how CMOs and CIOs can use the technology that's on-hand to ease this process — which will ultimately drive growth for the entire business. Below are four suggestions for building this power partnership in your company.

Find Common Ground - Differing incentives is one of the biggest barriers to an effective relationship between marketing and IT.

"There is an interesting intersection between risk management and innovation that emerges in the CMO-CIO interface." ~~Gene Morphis, former CFO of CVS and David's Bridal 

It's the ultimate intersection between those who are often tasked with driving change, innovation, and revenue growth (marketing) and those who need to ensure that there aren't any issues or risk with technology, information, and systems (information technology). It's up to the CEO to ensure that marketing and IT are on the same page in terms of both innovation goals and risk management.

The best way to overcome this kind of incongruence is to start by understanding — and respecting — the conflicting incentive structures of each department and working collaboratively to find common ground. In some instances, it may be necessary to align the CEO on a plan, but a united recommendation between the CMO and CIO has a better of chance of success.

Put Business Needs First, Infrastructure Second - While it seems intuitive, companies often mistakenly focus first on creating the infrastructure, and then focus on figuring out what to do with the data afterwards. David Norton, the prior CMO of Caesars Entertainment, suggests that "data infrastructure should follow an understanding of the business questions. For example, something as simple as deciding how to look at the data — hourly, daily, weekly — can influence how you organize the data." If the CMO works with the CIO to outline the data that they need to understand customers, the CIO can better ensure that the data infrastructure will be aligned with ultimate business needs.

Understand the Customer Holistically - Data can spring from a number of places: loyalty cards, purchases, social media behavior, website analytics, surveys, etc. And new technology can integrate these disparate sources of customer-related information. But this is a barrier for most companies.

"The challenge that we find with most of our clients is that they do not have the internal capability or bandwidth to focus on integrating customer data to generate superior insight. Yet, this assimilated perspective is precisely what is necessary to move ahead of the competitor's level of customer understanding." ~~Dr. R. Sukumar, CEO of a fact-based research and consulting firm

Even when firms effectively get a holistic customer view, they often lack the staff or bandwidth to act on it quickly. This is why they frequently turn to external partners to help fill the skill gaps needed to integrate, analyze, and use insight to drive business results. These external partners typically have the technology and expertise needed to successfully generate and leverage in-depth customer data.

Apply Tools that Everyone Can Use - Historically, data analysis and customer research has been reserved for only a few skilled employees (typically in marketing research) who can navigate technically sophisticated systems. But now emerging are technology-enabled reporting portals that enable multiple users in marketing — even the tech novices — to analyze customer research themselves. For example Dr. Sukumar's company, Optimal Strategix, is one of many that has developed such a universal tool, and he agrees, "Gone are the days when marketers had to get their information from a PowerPoint presentation that marketing researchers or consultants provided." The CMO now has the ability to be more hands-on with the customer information that is typically reserved for the CIO's team.

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• Unspoken in the IBM Global CMO Study: Content and people required to engage a million customers individually (starkscommunications.com)


• Does the Rise of the CMO Threaten CIOs? (pcadvisor.co.uk)