These papers are identified as being by Miquel Duque and Anna Johnson Duque, and are being posted by George Phillies. They describe the situation after the 2022 National Convention in Reno Nevada, but before the 2024 National Convention in Washington, D.C. Opinions are theirs, not mine…George Phillies.
The first document “Start Here” is already very long and is being posted in digestible segments.
TECHNOLOGY AND OPERATIONAL ISSUES
- The LNC’s major mistakes with technology after Reno have crippled the Party’s ability to perform the most basic tasks. LPHQ was using two CRMs, RaisersEdge for fundraising and CiviCRM for everything else, and Andy Burns (Civi admin) with the help of Dustin Nanna and others pushed to migrate off of RE and onto Civi, with the goal of removing redundancy. Instead, we lost five figures in monthly revenue, and Burns quit before completing the migration and left us with no documentation.
- Regarding the “fundraising crisis” crisis: Fundraising and membership are down for various reasons, and the data is so wrecked that it’s very difficult to objectively pinpoint the real reasons or the severity, but operating expenses are down enough that there has been ample cash to pay the bills and make numerous big ticket purchases. Revenue as well as political impact will continue to suffer until LPHQ has functional data and tools, and it’s a VERY expensive and time-consuming problem that the LNC apparently is not rushing to solve.
- Many staffers have quit (often when they should have been fired much sooner), and have gone without replacement, so the remaining staff is perpetually and increasingly overburdened.
- What this means is that the National Party is providing little to no value in the way of activism projects, candidate and affiliate support, etc. Ballot access prospects are worse and worse. Most of what they’re doing is panic fundraising to pay their own staff to do more panic fundraising. Not delivering but begging for more money to keep doing the same. Angela is attempting to remedy this in a frenzy of scattershot project launches, but the problems will keep getting worse.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
“Burns quit before completing the migration and left us with no documentation” – Is 100% NOT true. As others have said previously he was forced out / replaced 2 weeks prior to finalizing the migration. The new person was an “expert” who had no experience with civi crm. There was a TON of documentation. Everything was very well documented including every issue & the proposed fixes to those issues. Several months later they hired a company which also had zero crm experience (they were drupal pros) who never interviewed anyone including Ken, Andy or staff then after being paid thousands of dollars wrote a one page report (as previously reposted on FB) that essentially said they needed more money to come up with a solution. It took “management” over 9 months to even allow critical updates & patches to be ran (according to a report by Ken & others). They purposely tried to make sure the project was a fail (the basically sabotaged the process) so they could replace it with Microsoft Dynamics at over $100K a year.
Doesn’t track. It was replaced with Zoho and I’m not defending them.
In order for this to be responsible reporting, the other opinions should be polled. For example, the Duque reporting of what happened with the CRM is not a complete picture. Andy Burns and Ken Moelmann should be interviewed.
Membership systems. It always comes back to that.
I warned them about Civic CRM when it was first pushed. I can’t remember now whether that was 2016 or 2018, but a lot of promises were made to state parties that I questioned the validity of.
In the end, the victims are the state parties that like mine, decided to trust the national party. It was a horrible mistake to trust them.
I remember the very first LNC meeting I attended, listening to Mark Montoni talking about the failed conversion away from the previous membership system onto raiser’s edge. A lot of historical data was lost.
Civi can work if the infrastructure is designed properly. They did it wrong. It never should have been implemented on WordPress. But enough technical jargon…