Managing Relationships: Why, who, what and how

When people tell charities to “run more like a business”, one of the many aspects of this work that they fail to understand is the importance — and complexity — of relationship-building.

Social impact, especially charitable and volunteer-driven impact, is the product of a web of interconnected relationships between people: clients, partners, funders, stakeholders, volunteers, advisors, regulators, media, ambassadors to name just a few.

Charities rarely buy their way to social impact; instead, the most successful people, organizations, and movements are the ones with a talent for inspiring and sustaining people’s willingness to act. In our world, relationships are everything.

In the beginning, relationships form naturally

When your organization is new or small, managing relationships isn’t too complicated. You usually know your donors by name. You interact directly with your constituents. In the beginning, a founder or a core group of staff and volunteers will know your programs inside out and be able to move easily from one interaction to the next.

Success makes things harder

The more success you have, the more complicated relationship-building becomes. Your donor list grows and suddenly some of the names are unfamiliar. You are busy managing your team and growing programs, so it becomes hard to find time to connect with an ever-growing number of contacts. The relationships you have formed are so rewarding that it’s hard to justify broadening your network further. All the while, staff come and go within your network; knowledge and connections shift and fade.

What was once simple, is now complex. At some point, you are no longer able to do the things that made your organization successful in the first place. If you get stuck at this point, if you don’t change, then you’ll run out of hours and energy to hold it all together.

Welcome to scaling

Growing a thriving organization isn’t a linear process and it’s not just about doing more. At the right scale, a healthy organization achieves maximum impact for minimal effort based on the resources available. If you want to have an impact, equilibrium is more important than size.

Easy to say, but harder to execute.

Relationships — the lifeblood of your work — are one of the harder, riskier activities to scale. Relationships aren’t scripted, so you can’t teach people exactly what to do, or practice and test them in private. If you’ve been operating on instinct and intuition (talent), then you may not even know what you’ve been doing that works so well. But if you need to operate at a bigger scale to fulfill your mission, then you need to find a way.

How to scale: Make a blueprint for your relationships

There’s no right system or universal solution for managing your relationships, but there is a process that helps you find ways to scale successfully. It’s a blueprinting process, a visualization exercise adapted from communications planning.

At Entremission, we call it the Relationship Blueprint.

Step 1: Choose a type of relationship

First, decide which type of relationship you want to map first — it could be donors, program participants, or volunteers. Start with one that you know well. Different types of relationships unfold differently, so if you are mapping an entire organization’s relationships you’ll likely need to do the exercise a few times.  (This approach also works for individual campaigns or activities)

Step 2: Touchpoints and journeys

You are going to do two things: make a list of all the different ways people — volunteers, for example, interact with your organization (the “touchpoints”) and arrange those touchpoints into chronological order (the “journey”).

You can start with the list, or you can start by describing the journey then adding the touchpoints. Either approach works. A list looks something like this:

A journey looks something like this:

Together, they look like this:

The technology you use to get started doesn’t matter — you can do it on paper, on a whiteboard, or in software like Miro. The process matters more than the format.

Step 3: Add the team

Next, identify the staff or volunteers who facilitate each touchpoint.

Are you the one interacting with people at every single stage? Do different people have responsibility for different touchpoints? Are there touchpoints where no one is responsible? Even if your approach is completely ad hoc or has obvious flaws, describe how things work today. Your list, journey, and team mapped together look something like this:

Step 4: Add the technology

Last, you need to add the “technology” that ties touchpoints together to create the journey.

You probably referenced some of the technology already in your touchpoints (e.g., your website, your Instagram account). Name it, then add the internal systems that hold it together, such as your CRM, your email systems, your social media accounts.

Relationships don’t flow from one stage to the next magically. When, where, and how do you engage with people? How is information about a relationship “remembered”? Is it in your head? Written down? Does it all happen in person?

However you’re engaging with people, that’s your “technology”.

Step 5: Step back and reflect

Now it’s time to switch from describing to analyzing how your touchpoints flow together. Once you’ve stepped back it may look something like this:

Looking at the blueprint you’ve created, examine each of the touchpoints to see what’s working, what’s fragile, and what doesn’t work as well as before. Review once from your organization’s point of view and once from the relationship’s point of view (e.g., the volunteer).

Which touchpoints are working really well?

Which touchpoints tend to cause internal confusion, take up too much energy, or don’t consistently meet people’s expectations?

Do you actually have the resources to engage with people effectively at each touchpoint (e.g., materials, content, key messages, training, technology)? Or are you scrambling to keep up?

Which touchpoints would be affected if the size of your programs or the number of people you engaged were to increase? Where would you lack capacity to keep up with expectations and volume?

Are there any touchpoints where it’s not clear who on the team is responsible? Does everyone inside your organization have clear responsibilities and the skills to fulfill them? Are those responsibilities clear to outsiders? Where might you need to clarify, increase training, or add more people in order to scale?

The answers to these questions become your action plan.

Using your Relationship Blueprint

The Relationship Blueprint shows you if, when, and how to scale. It shows you what parts of your process need to be clarified, what resources and technology are required, and what team members you’ll need to pull it all off. Armed with that information, you can make a budget and a workplan.

The hardest part will be finding and managing the people who are going to build relationships for the organization. You already know this.

The second hardest part, for some, will be embracing the technology that makes it all possible. In particular, every organization needs a good Community Relationship Manager (CRM, or “Customer” Relationship Manager). Your CRM can be a spreadsheet in the beginning. The technology you choose is less important than choosing something and developing the habit of recording information about your relationships.

Without a Blueprint and the right tools, you’re gambling your organization’s entire mission on the hope that enough people with the right mix of expertise, personality, and availability will come along at the same time. You’re gambling that they’ll intuitively communicate perfectly, never leave, and never rest. Most missions are too important for this kind of gamble. With a Blueprint, you know where you are. You know where you need to go. You know how to bring other people along. You just need to go out and do it.