Since starting Tissot Solutions LLC at the beginning of this year, it's been my mission to build a fundraising firm that can service political candidates at scale. To work toward this, we've started documenting every task and workflow that we do on a regular basis.
Such an endeavor has taken up an extraordinary amount of time and energy, but it's an investment that the firm will reap for many cycles to come.
To quote the venture capitalist Bill Trenchard:
"For anything you do more than three times, write down your process in detail.
People who do amazing things write it down. Startups don't do that enough."
I firmly believe that political campaigns don't do that enough. In fact, I've never been on a campaign that diligently documents how it operates. I'd argue this is largely caused by political campaigns having end dates and being forced to operate within a short time frame.
For a consulting firm that plans to operate cycle after cycle, we have to think long-term and map out processes that we will be executing for years to come. Onboarding a new client should be as simple as following a step-by-step checklist and launching a new fundraising event should follow the same steps every time as well.
So far, having both written documentation and video guides that walk team members through how to complete a task or workflow has been a gamechanger. These guides help us standardize all of our workflows, reduce the number of questions that I have to answer and the amount of feedback that I have to give, and help the firm quickly onboard & train new team members.
To store and organize all of our documented processes, we use Notion and Loom.
Notion is a workspace database, note-taking tool, and a revolutionary way to organize the way your company operates.
Loom is a powerful web app that allows you to quickly record custom videos from your computer and share them with others.
Each of our guides in Notion has five parts:
1. Why do we do this?
2. Video Guide (Recorded via Loom)
3. Written Guide
4. Resources
5. Definition of Done
Here's an example Notion page from one of our workflow guides:
I really wanted to directly link one of our Notion pages to this blog, but each and every Loom video included confidential client information such as donation and donor data that I couldn't make public. So instead, here are screenshots from one of our guides.
Steps go on until step 35.....
For our firm's Administrative Assistant, I've created 17 Notion guides that go over every task they complete in detail. Here's what their Notion page looks like:
Having both a video and written guide gives our team members multiple ways to learn and see how a task should be executed. Furthermore, by recording a video guide of myself conducting a workflow, I can then have another team member put together the written guide and finish the rest of the Notion page just from my video alone (another layer of delegation).
The last two sections of each Notion guide are called Resources and Definition of Done. These are super helpful to answer any questions and provide a clear definition of when the task is complete. Each resources section includes supporting documents, nuances, and FAQs.
Furthermore, every time a team member asks a question about a documented workflow, we update the respective Notion guide. We either edit the written guide or add new text to the Resources section. These processes aren't written in stone and we update each of them as new feedback and refinement take place.
All of these documented processes and their resulting Notion pages allows us to delegate tasks to other team members and give them the tools they need to accomplish them with a high level of consistency. Delegating is truly a superpower and the only way that our firm will be able to service candidates consistently and at scale.
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