Spoiler Alert:

I made a thing better, resulting in a 50% cost reduction and 92% fewer resource hours needed the following year.

It all started when…

…I landed at CRISTA Ministries, a non-profit organization located in Shoreline, Washington. CRISTA houses seven distinct brands, ranging from world relief to alternative education to senior living facilities to youth camps — all serviced by a centralized internal design studio.

Every year in January, CRISTA sends Giving Summaries to individual donors who contributed to any of its ministries during the previous calendar year.

In January 2017, the Giving Summaries were mailed late.

With no previous project management leadership, each ministry brand had been permitted to customize its design, content, and donor list data. This led to inconsistencies in how each donor list was pulled and how the information was presented through content and design. This was problematic for our design schedule, our data team, and the budget.

Just before mailing, an error was discovered in several of the donor lists that were generated. The team had to scramble to pull the design and data files back from the print/mail house, pull new donor lists, and audit them again before re-sending to the print/mail house. This delayed the mailing by a week and caused tension with the internal client.

My goal for January 2018: to mail on time and error free.

I knew we could streamline the process for next year so we never had to deal with that mess again.

I started by holding a retrospective.

(They hadn’t done one before.)

I invited the creative team, data team, customer service team, and ministry stakeholders to a discussion about what worked, what didn’t work, and what ideas they had for next time.

Of course there were sticky notes.

Of course we played a post-up game.

Everyone had 5 minutes to write one piece of feedback on each sticky note, then we took turns posting and sharing our comments one by one.

(This levels the playing field for introverts/extroverts, men/women, and leaders/non-leaders so everyone has a chance to respond and provide feedback.)

We spent a few minutes grouping sticky notes according to themes, then I led a discussion to identify top priorities for making it better the next year. I followed up with a summary memo to everyone involved, plus the Senior VP of our department.

Then I made a new plan.

Over the next eight months I met with the data, design, and customer service teams three times to review the project schedule, parameters of the data query, and the overall plan over the previous year. Process improvements included:

• Identifying a project owner who was outside of the ministries that would drive policy and decisions regarding the Giving Summaries process.

• Designing a Giving Summary statement template that allowed for ministry branding, a customizable content block, and a data merge with donor giving information.

• Testing the data to make sure the right numbers were pulled into the right fields.

• Simplifying the content to a giving report only, with a simple thank you note to the donor.

Regarding that last bullet point, part of the complication of previous years was that some ministries asked for an additional donation with the Giving Summary. Because of “do not solicit” codes in the database, this created another level of complication to the content and data lists generated.

I pitched this plan to the Senior VP of our department — including the shift away from asking for an additional donation. He agreed with our plan and committed to bring the ministry stakeholders on board with removing the ask.

The results were significant!

• 92% fewer resource hours used - only a single designer was needed, and the design was scheduled early, during a lull between projects.

• 50% cost reduction from the previous year - because of the streamlined template design and simplified mail merge, our print/mail house vendor was able to invoice it as a single project rather than invoice us per ministry brand.

• The summaries mailed on time - we held to our deadline and reduced the level of stress and chaos on the team.

Boom.