Guest Contributor: Andrew Shoaff, technology executive working with providers serving the nonprofit market.

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Over the last several years I have noticed a trend of how nonprofit organizations use and experience new SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products.  The larger and more complex the SaaS product, the more closely the organization’s experience follows the trend.

Following the implementation organizations generally see rapid adoption of the SaaS tool. That’s good news, but inevitably there is a plateau of product use as the product’s adoption within the organization stabilizes.  At this point one of two things happens: the organization is able to break through into another positive phase of product use, or it stalls with the product and starts to look elsewhere for another resource or vendor.

The trend is visualized in the following graph, where the Y axis is the organization’s adoption of the product, and the X axis is time post product implementation.

Every product is different, as are the agreed-upon expectations between a vendor and the nonprofit regarding how that product will be (ahem, should be) conformed to the needs of the organization.  But even with the vast differences in all these products and how organizations ultimately use them, the use curve above can be broken down into three defined stages: honeymooning, plateau and renewal or removal.

Phase I: Honeymooning

Phase I of a new SaaS implementation is characterized by rapid adoption and use of the product.  Nonprofits have access to new and exciting functionality, strategies for reaching and engaging with constituents and supporters, data that help illuminate new insights, and valuable assistance from the vendor. These help put the new product to work at the organization.   There are growing pains with any new platform, and adoption certainly adds some strain to already overworked nonprofit staffers, but the initial period post product implementation can be an exciting time.

Phase II:  Plateau

Within months, or even up to a few years, depending on the scale and complexity of the new system, the organization starts to see a plateau of its use of the product.  That usage plateau will often coincide with a similar plateau or even a reduction in the product ROI.  This is a normal and expected process and it happens for any number of legitimate causes. These include such things as user attrition and the corresponding loss of institutional knowledge of how to use the product; the nonprofit’s having already outgrown the initial rollout of strategies; or the impact of market factors necessitating a shift in priorities or resource allocation.

It’s important for both the organization and the SaaS vendor to see this plateau as a natural part of the product life cycle.  It doesn’t necessarily mean the nonprofit has done anything wrong or that the vendor has ignored its customer. It simply means something has to change for the organization to continue to be happy with the product.

This is the inflection point of the entire customer–vendor relationship as the customer starts thinking about going elsewhere.  Very often the plateau will be followed by a slight dip in product use, such as a decline in the number of people using the product, or the product’s frequency of use, or revenue generation through the product, or the breadth of product functionalities used by the organization. When this dip occurs it’s reasonable for the nonprofit to start questioning if there is another system better suited to its mission.

Phase III: Renewal or Removal

In Phase III, one of two things happen: renewal or removal.  If the plateau and dip are solved, then the user experience curve goes into another period of acceleration or renewal.  But if the dip isn’t solved, the relationship between vendor and the nonprofit organization suffers, often irrevocably. The product is likely on its way towards removal and replacement.

What to Do: Experience Mapping

So how can a nonprofit anticipate these phases, ensuring long-term success with a new SaaS product? For most nonprofits any new technology represents a big expense, with long-term impact on the organization’s revenue generation and overall financial health.

To be truthful, there are a host of key project management and change management initiatives that will encourage long term SaaS product success.  But here I’m going to focus on one key aspect: the product Experience Map (or Journey Map). I believe this important tool gets overlooked by both the vendor and the organization. More than anything else, having a defined, measurable Experience Map is critical for nonprofit organizations to maximize their investment in new SaaS technology.

The Experience Map defined

An Experience Map is really nothing more than a set of criteria for the organization’s use of a new product.  Begin by asking your organization the following questions:

• What are the key pieces of the product’s functionality that you will use?
• When will you be able and ready to access all those features?
• How does your expected use of the product align to your organization’s fundraising or events calendar?
• What key outcomes do you expect and when you think they will happen?

The answers will help you lay out a timeline, in cooperation with an internal project management team, the vendor, or both. The timeline projects when you will use certain product functionality and defines the results you expect to see.  It is important for the organization to understand that you do not start using every function of the SaaS product overnight.  It takes time to get everything in place, and then to make sure the product users are comfortable enough with the baseline functionality to move to more advanced options.  And, it takes time to see results.  That’s just how software works.

An Experience Map answers the following questions:

1. When will functionality be employed by the organization?
2. Who at the organization will use this functionality?
3. What are the quantitative outcomes expected?
4. How will the results be measured?
5. When are those outcomes expected?
6. If an outcome milestone is missed, what is the process or plan to get back on track?
7. Who is responsible and accountable for handling this at the organization?
8. At what point will the organization look to the vendor for help keeping the Experience Map on schedule, and how can the vendor help if/when any milestone is missed?

Having an Experience Map that specifies a project plan helps keep everyone on track. This applies to both the nonprofit organization and the software vendor.

The purpose of the Experience Map isn’t necessarily to eliminate the plateau or dip of Phase II.  As I mentioned, that often happens in the natural course of using a product.  However, a defined Experience Map will keep the organization in Phase I longer, and help identify the start of Phase II so that the organization can mitigate that dip, moving into Phase III much faster.  Phase II need not be a protracted experience, but without a usable map of what will happen, who will do what, and what the outcomes will be, organizations often spend far too much time — and waste too many precious resources — mired in Phase II.

Summary & Conclusions

Nonprofit organizations looking to implement a new SaaS system: think as critically about the post-implementation process as you do the implementation plan itself.  Spend real time with your team and your vendor to map out what your experience will be and how you will get there.   Celebrate the quick wins but use those wins to keep close track of where you are against that defined experience.  All this adds some time to the planning process, but doing so will pay big dividends in the future.