 Hi, I am Tony Cappecini, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Parsons TKO. We are the engagement architecture consulting firm helping mission driven organizations with their processes, plans, technologies and governance and moving everything forward to really focus on affinity building with audiences and all the pieces in between there. And I'm really excited for today's conversation. You know, we're going to talk about, you know, have we reached the peak CMS. CMS is very much, it's aligned with websites. We think about, when you hear CMS, you often think about websites. You know, websites are still important and they are big investments and they tend to be invested in, you know, but they're still not the one ring to rule them all. I think there is a potential that, you know, over investments in content management systems and websites can really lead to a lopsided portfolio and kind of hurt what you're trying to do a little sometimes in some of that engagement architecture for really building affinity with audiences and being able to segment over time. So I think some things we're going to dive into today, you know, how do we know when an industry or a technology is reaching a plateau? How do we, how do we consider technology evolution and the obsolescence of technology that we know will happen as part of our budgeting and planning and thinking about going forward, especially during digital transformation that's really occurring now, amplified by the current state of affairs we're living in under COVID, really pushing everything to that digital front. And then how much does technology even matter when at the end of the day, it's really all about the people and our organizations and the processes that we have to use to make these things work. So again, I'm really excited. Like I said, we are recording. Please ask questions in the chat and I'm going to introduce my guest panelist now, my good friend, Deanna Humphrey, if you'd like to say a word or two, Deanna. Hey, everybody, thanks. Excited to be here. My name is Deanna Humphrey and I'm the managing director at Dubic Things, which is a digital marketing agency. So we work with a lot of clients on fundraising, advocacy and overall like messaging and Tony and I have known each other for a few years now. When he was a partner with me over at No Kid Hungry and helping me solve some of these same problems. So excited to be here with all of you to discuss this. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you, Deanna. And our friend, Felipe Jaramillo, who I'm going to let you say your last name. I've been practicing it for like three days now, Felipe. Thank you, Tony. Hello, everybody. My name is Felipe Jaramillo. I'm the CEO and founder of Aplica. I've been working on the CMS space for over 50 years. I've been exposed to small, medium and very large sites. And I think we're seeing very interesting trends in the transformation of the CMS space or the evolution of CMS, to the XP and to achieve a broader set of capabilities for organizations. So it's very nice to be able to discuss some of these trends and some of our vision from both a technical and an organizational point of view. Thank you, Felipe. Our last discussion for today, my partner, Nate Parsons. Hello, everybody. It's nice to meet you all. Yeah, and I'm excited to discuss this topic as well. I'm Tony and Felipe and other folks, and I have been having this conversation for many years now in various forms. And it's nice to kind of have a chance to talk about what we're seeing now. Because I think just in the last two or three years, there's been a really interesting shift in the focus and where a lot of the research and R&D money seems to be going from the commercial CMS vendors. And I think there's that boats for trends all across the board, even in the open source CMS world. So yeah, but I'm excited to talk with you all about this. Excellent. And I would be utterly remiss if I didn't thank Andrea Bishop from Parsons TKO, who is our administrator and makes all of these events happen. Thank you, Andrea, it is most appreciated as always. So without further ado, Parsons TKO, we do have a saying. We like to say that answers get all the credit for questions, do all the work. So, you know, today is really one of those explorations and to see what questions we can ask and kind of what ideas as a group we might be able to pull away from this. The topic of this conversation started as an internal discussion that Nate really got into the other day and it was pretty fascinating, which is, you know, how have we reached peak CMS? And you had started talking about when we think about cell phones or mobile phones, whatever the proper way to call them is these days. But, you know, you're continually buying, but how much feature are you getting for every new expense and every time you buy a new phone? And has CMS started to move in that direction as well? So, Nate, I don't know if you want to lead us off and then we'll start tossing it around to our other panelists. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, we were talking, I was kind of like recounting my historic view of CMS. You know, when I first started doing website development way back in, like, you know, 2000, a lot of the content management systems did everything that you needed to do online, you know, they handled all of the content, all of the marketing, all of that functionality. But that was partly because it was a simpler time and people didn't really know what they're doing and anything that could like lower the technical barrier to doing this activity was welcomed. There were a lot of all-in-one CMSs that did all of your marketing. But then, you know, over the period of time, you know, those started to mature and people started to say, hey, instead of having a CMS that kind of does a few things well, I'm going to get a specific email program and a specific CRM program and a specific social media program and all these different things. And people started to get really deep specialized programs that kind of help different parts of their marketing and handle different channels. And, you know, just over the last couple of years, I've started to see the pendulum shift back. And partly the reason for that is that CMSs have kind of reached a place where they do all the things that they need to do to manage the web channel. And, you know, there's different, you know, kind of mixes of strengths and weaknesses in that interface or the object models of these different content management systems, but they all are sort of converging on the same place in terms of what they do and what value they provide. And what we've seen is that the vendors who are realizing this are starting to add and pull back in things to their platform, partly because one of the things that's still hard is not necessarily reaching some of the first time, but engaging with them multiple times and having a deeper and, you know, more meaningful relationship with your audiences. And so what we've seen is that a lot of CMSs are starting to rebrand themselves as digital experience platforms. And what that DXP moniker really means is that they're trying to pull in some of the CRM functionality and some of the marketing automation functionality and some of the, like, contact management functionality, basically that other systems use to manage and try and connect that with the web content to make it a lot easier for someone who comes to your website to be part of a larger and more repeat conversation. And, you know, I think that trend is, you know, sort of a good example of why they don't think there are features directly in the content management world that are valuable or differentiating enough anymore. And so that made me sort of like, well, maybe we've kind of hit the peak of this technology or this need for, you know, the foreseeable future. So that's kind of what led to this discussion in a little bit, I think. Felipe, you've been building content management systems for a long time, you know, and Nate brings up DXP. What are you seeing in that space? Is there an evolution to experience platform and how fundamentally different is it than a content management system? Yeah, we're seeing a trend of the higher end CNS systems rebrand themselves as digital experience platforms. And I think this shifts the focus from content into a broader experience, primarily for the customer. But also there are other implicit experiences when you're bringing up projects, right? Like there is the organizational experience, the development experience, the operational experience. But essentially they're trying to broaden the type of customer experience that are supported. You see very interesting trends this year. So the analysts think that we've reached somehow which big CNS, the garden magic quadrant has stopped being issued for web content management. They think that WCM is a mature, that products are too homogeneous, that we've reached maturity of these products and Forster actually calls them that we've completed the classic era of CNS, right? So there's the CNS space still needs some work. And if you're very involved in the technical or editorial part, you still feel that there's quite a few things to do. But I think the focus is shifting towards integration with other technologies, towards a personalization. It's a key trend that you see, or it's a key turn that you see mentioned quite a bit. And you also have the multiple challenges that need to be fulfilled. So I think that some systems are better suited to the DXP space. Some other systems are not aspiring to become a DXP. And a key finding you see that there was no clear winner of the CMS war, right? There no system came out on top and it's actually a reflection of different organizations needing different systems to do different things. And we're gonna see that transition take place the higher end systems are rebranded as DXPs. For some other lower tier systems, just are happy to be CMS systems for the broad public. If personalization is the desired gold standard, does being in something like a DXP make that an easier pathway to get this personalization compared to the CMS that's weaved in with the marketing automation system, with the analytic system with? Well, I think there is a promise of integration, right? And I think it's also driven because of the fact that it's very hard to integrate disparate systems. So the promise integration says, okay, you'll use this CMS system and you'll use some sort of personalization engine that is built in the system and you'll use some e-commerce capabilities that are built into the system. I think that personalization is a big promise but when you start looking at the details of implementation and what people want to be exposed of and how much personal information you're actually is actually being used to drive this experience can have a mixed set of feelings from the end user. So I think that personalization is still something that we're saying as being done either more explicit or in certain cases more implicit just based on your browsing patterns or other content that you're consuming. Tiana, all right, take it over to you. I know from working with you and in your experiences tying, needing to tie things like fundraising in to that experience, which the website for all intents and purposes might be a way to get people onto a list but it becomes that segmentation and then trying to get to personalization. And if all budgets always gone to web, what's left for email? And how do you feel about having monolithic systems back to separated systems back to it all in one? It's like five questions in one for you. Yeah, and I'm gonna apologize now because my cat is very passionate about this as well. So you'll probably hear him screaming in the background. So just don't mind him here. I think that the question I think a lot of organizations are asking themselves like do you have this sort of one system to rule them all? Or do you have these sort of separate systems? And the challenges to Felipe's point is that no matter how much they say they integrate, right? Most systems do not talk to each other in time that won't lose some data somewhere won't like have a manual process in the system at some point or just be really clunky because they're proprietary and they want you to use their one system to rule them all. And I think when you're thinking about the creating an experience for your users it is important that the narrative that you're talking about on digital is reflected everywhere and that you have a real understanding of where and how people entered into that narrative so that you can create an experience that speaks to that narrative. So when you invest a lot in your website but you don't have an email team or a digital team that's balancing out those other pieces you're losing some part or if you're not working in coordination with your fundraising team and your programming team you're losing out on some of that personalized experience. And the thing is that audiences have become so sophisticated these days that to just assume that just because they got to your content somehow that whatever you say is just that they're gonna and whatever experience that you think that you want them to have is enough is no longer enough. I mean, for some people it is, right? But I think that, you know having clear data points of where folks came in and trying to speak to that experience is going to change how people engage with you because ultimately, you know you want the people that come to your organization to be ambassadors for your message and the best way to do that is to create a personal connection with them and that's by doing that is like looking at the data seeing where people came in and seeing, okay well, I've got a pool of people here that came in through the website and they came in through the website let's say through an Omaze campaign or something like that, right? For those of you who have engaged in Omaze campaigns you've probably seen a drop off after people have tried to win this car with Daniel Craig or whatever I tried, I didn't win but they really just wanted to win that car and hang out with Daniel Craig but let's figure out how we convert them into somebody who actually cares about your organization and so, you know, you're gonna use the data and you're gonna use, you know talk to the, you know, where they came in and, you know, create that personalization experience because then they're gonna say oh, actually they really care about me even though that's your systems at work right behind that's creating an experience that makes them feel like they're really truly valued and then they're gonna turn around and be ambassadors for that message so, you know, I think while, you know some organizations are not gonna get to this place where the X caliber of all the things it is important that like, you know there is a balance between, you know fancy pretty website and the all of the other pieces that are integrated because it's the same thing, right? With the very sophisticated email program and then you send them to a website that is like six clicks before they get to what they are looking for folks are gonna have that same experience, so. I'm curious and then I'll start I'll get back over to you, I promise Nate but Deanna, we have talked about integration so far now in this conversation but it's been from a very technical perspective and you started talking about the different departments that all have to start playing together. I mean, how much integration of systems matters and how much does it really matter that the organization starts to integrate how the different departments work together including the budgets between the departments? I don't know if you have thoughts on this I know you've had some inside experiences I have as well, but I'd like to hear from you if you have some thoughts on that. I know I have thoughts on this having worked with me as, you know trying to make not just the systems talk together but the teams talk together, right? Because, you know, I think that it is a very old school but it's still very much a live notion that when you're talking to your donors this is donors only and this is the fundraising department's responsibility and then when you're talking other things it's the comms responsibility and you might be talking programs and it's really the program's responsibility but those things work in accord with each other. You know, if the fundraising team doesn't know what the program team is working on how can they really truly talk about how our work is making a difference? If the digital team is not integrated with the fundraising team how can we truly make sure that no matter where the budget is, right? Because every organization is different some organizations digital is raising the money but the budget line is in fundraising some, you know, it may be a combination of both. So, you know, I really think it is critical that folks, you know, I had a client recently that was like, how can we do this work? And I said, well, at a minimum you should be starting with like having an integrated team that is talking through those things you should be planning together to ensure that even though, you know, listen there's gonna be goals that each team has which is also critically important because the goal shouldn't be like support the fundraising team, right? Because that's not where the work ends for digital or for programs but it is so important to have folks talking to each other and aligning on goals because I think that you're losing out on something when the departments that are doing a heavy lift for the organization are not truly integrated and not talking to each other and not ensuring that the sort of the cyclical you know, when I worked at Greenpeace when we unleashed campaigns on KFC or whomever we had the digital, we had the media we had the grassroots team all of us integrated to make sure that that campaign experience no matter where people saw that campaign unravel it was, you know, all the message was the same thing and that when you drill down into thinking about digital it's no different. So I think that is a really critical point that I think that a lot of organizations even now are still struggling with. Thank you. And you know, as you were talking it was making me think maybe if we really went upstream maybe the integration really has to start with when we get the budgets and that starts getting put together is stop looking at it as the comms budget the fundraising budget, the IT budget, the this budget and how do we actually make those all sort of tie into that portfolio picture. But Nate, this is something we talk about a lot and 2020 has been a hell of a year to say the least how do we, how should we think about, you know digital transformation is here what do we think about this planning going forward? What kind of budgets should we be thinking about and what things could we be asking for looking out towards in the future? Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, everything Diana said really resonates with me because I think one of the things that I think is also true is that fundraising departments often have the skill sets to use these digital experience platforms more deeply than the communications teams but the communications teams are usually involved in the procurement of these kinds of solutions. And so I do think there's a need for kind of joint budgeting and thinking through those pieces. You know, it's not uncommon in some, in nonprofits for the fundraising team to have separate messaging separate communication, separate contact lists from the communications team. You know, even though there's a clear parallel, right? Like if you think about it from a sales perspective the communications team is sort of the lead generation arm where they're meeting people they're building the reputation on the brand and they're finding people who might want to become deeper supporters either financially or reputationally or activity wise. And, you know, that handoff is really awkward in a lot of organizations because kind of like you go from one messaging and one marketing kind of campaign to a totally different one run by different people with different sensibilities and sometimes even different language about the organization or different imagery around their organization. And, you know, this technology shift has the possibility and the opportunity to solve a lot of those problems. And so that's the promise of it. I think that's the advantage of it but it requires both cooperation in terms of using the platform, configuring the platform, jointly deciding the platform but maybe more importantly on the business process and the campaign work and the thinking about how contacts are organized and the value of an anonymous person and how you turn that anonymous person into a valued supporter. You know, and I think that this concept of like prospecting within your audience base is pretty novel in the communication side but it's very well understood in the fundraising side. And there's a huge opportunity there for them to sort of cross train each other and to learn from each other. You know, and I think that's why this is hard and why a lot of organizations struggle with digital experience in all its formats even if they don't have a all in one platform or they even have great integrated platforms. It's because the people process behind it is the digital transformation piece that is the hard piece. Like you can go buy HubSpot CMS today and it'll be awesome and integrated with all of that data but that won't make it your experience awesome. You know, what'll make your experience awesome is, you know, developing a wonderful and cohesive, you know, outreach campaign that moves people from. I heard about you from something. I came to your website. I was really interested in it. I took a deeper action. Like I attended a webinar or I signed up your email list or whatnot. And then as I got to know you better other opportunities were presented to me that stair stepped me into a deeper engagement with the organization. And, you know, that's the success mindset. I think that will help drive organizational success both in the private and the nonprofit communities. Excellent. Felipe, question for you. So as a leader in that, you know, CMS application development space and all the work you've been doing when you come in and take these projects on what are the conversations like with the folks you're having and hearing Deanna and Nate talk a lot about here really is CRM and email marketing. How does that play into your thinking when you come in to build those bigger applications? Well, you're muted too, Felipe. So I think that the organizations have the challenge of deciding if they need to replatform their CMS if they need to go to a different system in order to achieve the kind of vision that is being brought in by, you know, fundraising or the comp same. So I think that we're changing from a mature industry for CMS into more promise of an integrated digital experience. And I think that we're in the early days of the XP and we're in the classic or mature days of CMS. And I think that what makes it hard is that the switching costs of CMS is quite high, right? And it's tightly integrated with the experience that you designed today. So considering the life cycle of the CMS platforms is definitely a challenge as you need to involve IP as you need to involve the different organizational units to make the decisions, understanding that it's going to be very hard to switch and that you're gonna have a lot of investment into a CMS-centric platform. And as you start integrating business-heavy operations into that new experience, it's going to be harder to migrate to a different platform and also to understand that some of these CMS systems are not built for this DXP vision. They may not be branded, but there is going to be a lot of rebuilding and internal rebuilding of the systems that are going to require you to be either up to date with their newer versions or do some sort of redevelopment as you move along. So in this transition phase, that's definitely a key consideration for the future. It's probably not as easy as moving from other pieces of the experience moving forward. Yeah, as you're talking there, it just makes me think... Yeah, I've been doing technology implementation for a really long time, too, 20-plus years, and you'd always get to the end, you'd implement it, it'd be out there, and then you'd have to talk about that maintenance budget. And everyone's like, what? I'm gonna pay something? You're like, yeah, it's not done. But it's never done, right? Digital transformation isn't like, there's no destination there. You're gonna keep going. We say that about data as well. I think I've seen some questions come in on the... We're here at C. I'm curious about what the panelists think are actionable KPIs that can be shared across teams in order to create more shared goals and experiences for audiences. Thank you, Emily. That's a great question. Does anyone want to start with that one? I am. That's a great question. And when I think about goals, creating goals for my team, I'm often asking them to look at organizational goals that trickle down, and so their goals should be feeding up. And when thinking about how do you ensure that you've got some KPIs that speak to all of your top programs, fundraising, digital, and programs, I think that you have... If folks are planning together and that you can come up with those goals, because I think a lot about the disconnect, no matter how much we plan together, that's one thing in every organization that I've worked with that has attempted to integrate has been missing from goal setting is to creating those goals that feed into one another. And I think that that is truly the thing that's missing because then that top line North Star feeds down to your departments and then feeds down to... Yeah, I can't see. He's got a lot to say about this. Feeds down from your department, then feeds down to individuals. And then as they're creating their goals, that feeds up to those sort of master goals. So I think that having an integrated fundraising goal, and that is not just online, right? Because when you think about fundraising departments, obviously have offline goals, but we need to make sure that from the digital team, that that is reflected somewhere in our digital communications that there is the ability to give offline and not just talk about online. When we're talking about our program goals, programs need to be sure that they are talking about what digital assets they have to be able to engage in using those platforms to communicate their program goals on a regular basis. So I think that as part of a goal setting process, if you are having an integrated fundraising goal, an integrated program goal, an integrated digital goal that all feed into the sort of circular that then will feed down to your departmental goals and then your team goals, I think that that's a great place to start. Nate and Felipe, you want to talk about KPIs? I'll just start one on real quick, which is that, I think that KPIs create a little bit of positive tension between departments are really valuable. Like I think if the communications team needs to deliver certain amounts of prospects to the development team, that kind of thing can be really positive because it's really easy for those departments to never speak. So I think just building on what Diana said, I think if they can trickle up together, that's much better than if one department does X and another department does Y, right? Because they really need, you're trying to foster bridges, both technology, communications and process between those activities. And so that's just one little area that I think KPIs in particular are very valuable if one department has to service another department directly in their KPI. I mean, at this time I wouldn't have a set of KPIs that are applicable to different organizations, but it definitely would say is that, you need to have a data practice in your team so that you can clearly define what those KPIs are going to be. When we talk about experience, and if we look at just plain visits or PhDs, it's very hard to infer how satisfied they are with that experience and what they are actually needing. So I've seen great benefits in having usability practice where somebody is actually looking at the actual usage patterns of a wide array of users and also having a deeper analytics approach with a data center team so that you can actually extract the data that is going to be more meaningful. As you start working across systems, you may have systems that talk together, but they are not reporting together. So having a match between a lot of these static metrics is going to be very important to actually have a broad view of what is actually being achieved. I'd like to think about that too in terms of how they are being reported and reported up and who is going to see them because you can make these great KPIs across that department level, but if it never gets back to the executive team and the executive team actually doesn't care, then what was the point? So how do we really think about what the executive team is looking at from that top level to get those KPIs back and then I think there's, because there's another question coming up here too, but there is consumer conversion experience, which is let me get a lot of donors to the website to do small dollar donation. There's influence building experience, which is very different. I want to build the cloud of this organization. I want to be really well known and I want the blue chip media markets and I want to get big fundraising dollars and I don't care as much about the $10 donation through the site. Those are very different experiences being placed in different areas. So I think that's something to think about too. And then what are those reporting mechanisms to go up? Oh, thank you for that, Emily. So Elaine has asked, do you have different advice for a large multi-siloed bureaucratic organization? I've spent a lot of time in those, lots of thoughts on that. First, a much smaller, less siloed one. Who would like to go first? Everybody's smiling. Nate and Deanna are smiling a lot. Deanna, do you want to go? I'll just dive in. Yes, there's definitely different advice. I think that one of the things that's really a challenge for both organizations, but is a bigger problem in smaller organizations, I think, is to pick tools that are best in class versus ones that are really well suited and fit for the team size you have and the capacity and effort people can put into those tools. And so it's very easy to overbuy or overbuild your outreach platform in a smaller organization, simply by picking a tool that has way too much functionality in it. And I think that's counterintuitive, but most of the time you want to be trying to aim for like 75 or 80% of the feature set of tool offers that your organization is using. And if you're not reasonably going to be able to achieve that in the next two years, you shouldn't probably get that tool, unless there's a big growth plan or some other reason that you think you're going to suddenly catapult up into a much larger team. You want to make that decision more collaborative between those groups, and you want to make sure that the time to learn the tool is low and quick for the people who are going to be engaged in it, because you're not going to be able to support onboarding and training and creating materials and updating all the training materials and all that sort of stuff. And that's sort of the big difference between large bureaucratic organizations and smaller, more agile ones. In larger bureaucratic organizations, you have the ability to build materials to kind of support people's onboarding processes that kind of can help ensure data quality and do those sorts of things. And so you can use tools that have bigger feature sets or more flexibility in how you can implement something. There might be seven ways to do something instead of one way to do something, because the process and the onboarding and bureaucracy can help manage those sorts of things. So that's kind of the positive, right? I think the negative in the large, multi-silo bureaucratic organizations is that they tend to procure these systems more than once. It's not uncommon for us to find not one CRM, five CRMs, each managed by a different program or different department, and they certainly often have their own websites and microsites, and it's not uncommon for them to have different email systems. And so the challenge in the big bureaucratic systems is to do what I call data contracting, which is to say, at the organizational level, like at a CTO or as Chief Operations Officer level, somebody needs to start saying, we are going to share the following data, and that's an organizational mandate. And we're going to let you have the freedom within the different fiefdoms inside the organization to share whatever you want. But you have to adhere to this data contract, which will let certain amounts of data be shared in certain regulated ways across the organization. And if those data contracts aren't in place, you're going to have real problems making all these things work and having a cohesive experience. But the flip side of that, and the reason that it's not always such an Achilles' heel is that sometimes those different parts of the organization are speaking to completely different audiences with completely different experiences. And so that's just one thing you have to weigh, is that the bigger and more complex an organization, the more use cases that are actually being serviced. And each of those use cases may or may not be a great fit to be in one solution or even be in one data contract. You may not want to have your supporting five through eight year olds be in the same email CRM campaign possibilities as something that's supporting military colonels who are serving overseas. Like in some organizations have literally those two groups as part of their program portfolio. And so that's just something to think through a little bit, which is that in big organizations you can lean on the bureaucracy positively, but you also have the possibility of dealing with a much more heterogeneous environment. So that's my thought. Yeah, just to add to that, because I think that a lot of the challenges for large organizations in part is like people just going out. And because they're operating independently, acquiring, getting CRMs to do just the one thing that they need to do. But the thing is, is that, you know, there may be those special groups that that CRM is speaking to, but what happens when one person is on all five of those CRMs and you're not talking to each other, right? So you're creating an experience for that person without even knowing that you might be messaging about one campaign, five different ways or whatever it is. Right. And so I think that it is important to, and this is very difficult for nonprofits in particular to stop and pause and like really assess what systems and what lists people are talking to. And, you know, it is not something that people want to do because the work often doesn't stop, right? And so especially for organizations that are often responsive to what's going on, but it is, it's important to take a pause and do an assessment. And, you know, one of the, I talked a lot about like integration with programs and funders and comms, but IT is critical to that because they're all, they have, you know, are often holding the keys to some of these systems and they have the knowledge to understand the, let's ask the problem that we're trying to solve, which I think oftentimes people don't either when they're bringing on new CRMs or not asking themselves, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? They say, I need a list on so and so isn't responsive. So let me just go ahead and build my own microsite or let me just go ahead and get the CRM and add another MailChimp account. When I don't even ask me about MailChimp, but like, you know, when someone else might be using a different MailChimp account. And so, you know, it is important to ensure that you at least have, you know, a liaison or something with these departments so that you're constantly having these conversations and planning conversations. And, you know, often what happens, right? When groups decide that they want to invest in digital, if that's even the question that they're asking, which is an important question that group should be asking, but if they decide, then, you know, there might be an explosion here of people on the digital side and maybe the fundraising is still tiny or there is a huge explosion on, you know, when I worked at Sierra Club, you know, one of the biggest priorities that we had was coal, right? Well, so then the Beyond Coal campaign shot up, you know, tenfold to everything else and how are we supporting that? And so, you know, it is important to also like ask yourselves as you're building your organization, as you're building your budgets, how are you supporting these things so that you're not just piece-mealing all of these things together and then asking yourself what happened to my list as the, you know, I'm seeing, you know, less engagement, less, you know, you know, a different experience for people online. I, you know, I am, I gave some money to some candidates in this last election and now I'm in the mega hold of the Democratic list and I don't even know, I can't even unsubscribe because every time I cut one off, four more pop up. Love our democracy, it's great, it's going to be great. However, I don't think anybody's asking what my experience is as a user who just literally got four emails about Georgia in the past hour and I will get more about Georgia in the past hour and I don't know where they're coming from and but you can bet, believe that somebody, these folks are talking to each other but they're not really truly talking to each other in terms of how that experience trickles down to the user and so I think that that's really important to sort of take a pause and sort of ask yourself, you know, are we doing this, right? And, you know, are we doing digital because it's really truly a strategy here? Are we thinking more of it on a very surface level because that's another question I think that, you know, people have to ask themselves for smaller organizations, it can be a little bit easier because you probably have deeper relationships and you may be wearing multiple hats, but that it's still, you know, I think the tendency to silo is still there and so that's something to, you know, just make sure that folks are addressing as they're building their programs. Interesting, I just maybe think it's so often that we'll sacrifice the depth of long-term affinity which we know is heavy return value for what we need to do in the immediate and short term thinking that the right, the priority of the moment is the crisis when it's really that long-term goal you got to get to. Felipe, I don't know if you wanted to weigh in on that one too, the bureaucratic versus... Yeah, what I feel is interesting is that some of these multi-silo bureaucratic organizations force you to deal with different sized silos. So sometimes you have like the main nonprofit which has some programs and essentially the technical decisions that are driving some of these transformations are done first in different stages or steps. So sometimes you start with a big, you know, mothership side and then you start having needs for the smaller projects and you have two main choices, right? You can have an integrated approach with some very strict governance and you find a system or a platform that allows you to have multiple sites sharing content that agents are working together or you have an approach where you leave some of these technical decisions for platform to the actual program owners in the organization. And I think that, you know, the promise of having an integrated system that will work across different independent sites and independent touchpoints is still quite critical but it also has the issues of governance and convincing some of these independent approaches that were usually previously operating independently with their own agencies or their own sites into joining with the promise of, hey, now we're going to build this great DXP system and you show them the brochures and you show them, you know, the sales material that you've gathered and probably their way of operating and their pain points are quite different from what, you know, the bigger organization has. Yeah, I'd say, you know, and then Elaine, thank you for that so much. The smaller organization, I would say the thing there is every purchase really matters. Every time a dollar goes out the door and that there is a higher expectation of the return on investment and a speed at which because it's digital people think it needs to be instant. You know, and marketing is at best the six month game once it gets started if you can run it consistently to you see returns where these larger bureaucratic organizations, they have budgets they have to spend within a year, right? They'll get towards the end of the year and it's, oh my God, I got $100,000 left in this budget. It has to go out the door. So the impact they feel in a technology choice being, it's not as critical as it could be in that smaller organization. So I'd say, make sure in the smaller organization, make sure you're really getting buy-in from the leadership they understand what it is you're trying to achieve the time and patience it's going to take to have that achievement hit because it won't be as instant as they think, but to reassure that you really have a strong plan on how it's going to get implemented to see it forward. And I think, you know, what Nate would say, and what we like to say apart from CKOs, you got to find the right fit solution, not the best in class. Like what's the thing that's going to work for you now to get to that six months to the year, because you can evolve out of it. Once things are there, you can always get to a bigger system. But that's a little bit what we see in those larger bureaucratic organizations. It's just the amount of money they have to spend and literally have to spend or they don't get it back the next year. So thank you for that. So I have a question from John Wheeler. He says, I'd like to know how you can evaluate ROI for additional costs of going to a more customized web experience? Who wants to dive into that one first? I have some thoughts on that because I've actually been thinking about that recently, which is that I think this is another place where the development teams inside nonprofits, especially have a lot of experience, right? Like there's an average amount of money that's given to you by a first-time visitor, anonymous web visitor. And there's an amount of money that's given to you by a high net worth donor who you've built a relationship with, who is really supportive of your organization's mission, right? And there's usually a pretty big golf between those two. And as we personalize the experience, what we're really doing is moving people from the very far left side stage where they're anonymous and they may give you a small donation closer to the large, deeper relationship side where they're likely to give you a larger donation. And if you're personalizing your outreach well, what you're really doing is creating an additional stage of higher value, potential higher value users. And that value might be in reputation or it might be financial or it might be in reach. There's different ways that they help the organization. And I think each of those should be sort of measured. Some of the people you've built a personalized experience for are going to build their personal brand with your content and with your organization more online. And that'll increase your reach and your reputation if you're doing a good job with that. Other folks will feel a higher affinity to you and might have a longer lifetime value instead of giving you $5 once, maybe they'll give you $5 a month for five years. And so there's a lifetime value there. And then for others, it might be that they are in a position to wield influence that helps your organization. Maybe they staff a congressperson. Maybe they make decisions within an organization that you want changed or influenced. And I think each of those folks, you get to know better and you have more ability to access their potential with the personalized experience. And the first thing to do is to sort of help build that mathematical financial model that kind of says, we think that an anonymous web visitor is worth potentially this much. And it might be on the order of pennies when you average it out across the number of visitors to come to your site and the amount of money they generate. Versus behind network donor and then starting to stratify those things in between those, you know, or the foundational giver, whatever your largest beneficiary sort of is at the top end. And that model is really helpful because what you really want organizations to see is that if I personalize the experience, we are creating a more valuable cohort of our audience, however it may be valued. I think that's quite a challenge compared to other areas of personalization. So if you look at e-commerce, the personalization case is already settled, right? It's quite proven that, you know, conversions increase as you provide a more personal experience and you get, you know, product recommendations. And usually I see, you know, personalization platforms using these cases as applicable to different types of industries. I think in the nonprofit space, it's much harder to justify an ROI. And more than coming up with an ROI model is actually being able to explain it and making sure it's meaningful and it's measurable as you move along in implementation. It doesn't change as you start seeing, you know, real usage experience of personalization. I think the promise of, you know, people are going to get personalized content and you're going to have a few blog posts suggested for somebody based on their previous usage patterns is going to relate to, you know, deeper engagement and more affinity with the nonprofit. I think it's hard, I feel it's that way, but definitely sending an ROI model is going to be a challenge. I think just one thing to just add there, you know, I think that, and this is very elementary and probably everyone on this call knows this, but like getting the reports from the web team to see what, how folks are experiencing and investing in things like hot jar so that you can see where people, what people are doing and when, right? Because then you can say, okay, well, we see that people have come in, we've got a ton of people that are coming in through ads and they're doing the following X, Y and Z before they're dropping off. So then you can say, okay, well, we've seen this over time, this trend over time of this is what happens when people come in through ads. This is what happens when people come in through social. Then that says, okay, well, here's a place that you can make some investment, but that's, you've done that after doing, getting some data points from different softwares that you've integrated into your, to your web to say, okay, well, now's the time that we can show that this is the experience that people are having and this is where we need to customize to create a more personalized experience. Yeah, I think in terms of our, why there to just my two cents in the private sector, I mean, they're just using data so much more effectively and efficiently than we do in the mission-driven space. And we have to start embracing it more. I mean, what's the lifetime value of a contact that's been in your CRM? Can you even tell how many times did you change the CRM? And where, where has that contact been? How long has the contact been there? I think we often, again, just we sacrifice for the immediacy over the longterm. What's the five year gain or the 10 year, if I had a relationship with my nonprofit, you know, I've worked at some organizations celebrating 65, 75, 100 year anniversaries. All the contacts are still less than five years old. That's crazy. So how do we start to think about that? I think as well in that personalization and the return on investment is how do we get better at tracking those contacts over their longevity with us? And even not just maybe that dollar they give today, but how many other people they could bring back? Because if I really became a fan, am I going to spread your word for you? And now I bring three people back. So I'm, I'm my $10 multiplied by their $10. Just something I think about there. Thanks for that, John. That was great. Hope we answered that for you all. So we're about 10 minutes to close. I don't think we've answered the question though. Have we reached peak CMS? We've talked a lot about all the technologies that go around it. Should we be going back to the all in one DXP with a DXP style platform? It definitely sounds like it's got the, I like how you phrased it, Felipe, it's the promise of all that integration and making it a lot easier technically speaking, but we still seems like we have the people part to solve and that integration component. And how do we make common goals? But for closing thoughts on, are we at peak CMS? I might start with you, Nate, since you really spawned this topic in my brain. And I thought it would be fun to talk about with everybody here today. Yeah, sure. So I'll talk a bit about some of the things that the CMS needs to do and how I think those are kind of plateauing. So, you know, content management systems sort of started because people didn't really want to learn all of the HTML and CSS and JavaScript needed to kind of run their website, right? And so it kind of started out from less of a content management perspective and more of a layout management perspective, right? It wanted the content you had to look nice and be functional and work well. And, you know, content management systems because of that have always kind of been split between ones that model your content and manage your content really well in the back end and make it easy to find stuff and filter stuff and organize your content and ones that have more kind of bespoke layout and editing experiences for the front end that make things look nice, you know? And one of the reasons that I think content management systems are reaching this maturity point is that we're seeing more and more content management systems focus on managing the content and giving up on managing the layout. And so there are a lot of, there's a lot of energy right now in this area of the web called design systems, you know? Which are really a way of managing the front end, the layout of the website more consistently and more developer friendly in a lot of ways, not even necessarily more editor friendly. And there's a lot of focus on speed, you know? Google is putting pressure on everybody to make their website as fast and as responsive as possible so that you appear high in their page ranks and so that you get that organic traffic that they can generate. And, you know, because of that, there's all this energy and how can you make websites as fast as possible. And a lot of those are doing this thing called static page generation where instead of building the web page when somebody requests it, you build the web page ahead of time and you put it out there and then you maybe refresh it every five minutes or hour, four hours or 24 hours, whatever it is, and you push in your copy out and people always get that prebuilt web page, which makes it a lot faster to give it to that person, you know? Anyhow, all of that is sort of saying that, you know, from the CMS perspective, managing that front end experience is less valuable. Managing the content is more valuable. And a lot of the systems are starting to look exactly the same. So that's the other thing that you'll see. So if you look at contentful.com, which is an online only CMS, it only does the back end. It doesn't even really have a front end that you have to supply your own front end to it. And then in the sort of smaller scale world, there's a Kraft CMS, which is a PHP based CMS that has a front end component, but it's designed to really act as the back end component for you like an open source see, well, sort of commercial source version of contentful that you can put on whatever site you want. And then there are other systems like Netlif, Netafly and Heroku and other things that are providing the ability for you to write the content locally and just push the content to one of their servers where they'll create the website for you just from that content, you know? And so, you know, all this kind of means that there's a lot of energy going into like specializing the delivery of content more so than the managing of content, you know? And the content management tools are pretty similar between these systems. Like they all have some form of taxonomy. They all have some form of fields that you can create where you can put in the author's name in one field and, you know, the date of the content in another field. And, you know, the differentiation between these is really just an elegance at this point. It's not so much in feature differentiation, you know? And I think that's going to continue. And even WordPress, which historically has been like the, you know, one of the easiest CMSs to get in, but the content management tools are often kind of converged to the same place. And so, in three or four years, many of these systems are going to be indistinguishable in terms of what they do to manage your content. Thank you. Diana, some last thoughts for our audience? Yeah, I mean, I would plus one to everything that Nate said. And I think that, you know, while the, I don't think we've seen the peak of the end of the line for CMS, but I do think it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a digital need to catch up and integrate and make sure that like, as one is growing, so are the others, so that the experience doesn't is not diminished from the front end and frankly from the back end, because that data that we're getting and what we're seeing from people's experiences should really be helping to shape programs rather than the other way around. Thank you. So it's interesting because I had this discussion for quite a few years talking to the CMS vendors when they started focusing on integrations, I asked the same question. Is CMS a solved problem or not? And many of them thought that yes, it was a solved problem. It would solve most of the problems. It wasn't up there with what we would expect, but, you know, it was okay. It was time to focus on something else. And it's kind of frustrating to see that the industry is in self-moving. If you see content management systems, they manage content, but they're not dealing with content production. So now you're offloading that, all of the pre-editorial and planning and content strategy. Yeah, that's not an interesting step. And then delivery you start offloading some of the responsibilities to other platforms. So I see that in implementations. It's funny because I have to convince clients that CMS should do less and not more. And I see that as a key trend because for many years the vendors want to add as much capabilities as they could. And this created, you know, this huge checklist of things that CMS would be evaluated against. And these also allowed CMSs to have some big technical depth that would need to be filled in as you move along. As you see, you know, WordPress wasn't designed to be a general purpose CMS system, but it is dominating the CMS space for many years. So I think some are catching up in this core technical capabilities and some that already have them are broadening into the DXP space so that they do other stuff under the assumption that they had always solved many of the CMS problems before. Thank you. Well, thank you, Diana. Thank you, Felipe. Thank you, Nate. Thank you, audience, for being here today. As I said, I don't know if we had all the answers, but I'm definitely proud of the right questions to keep you all thinking about where we're going with content management systems, technology and budgeting into 2020.