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My Lockdown Experience So Far

Kelly and I have been working from home for over nine weeks now. The IHS office has been closed for eight, which is roughly how long most statewide shelter-in-place / stay-at-home orders have been in effect.

Here’s what a typical day looks like for me:

  • Wake up and spend time with Henry
  • Drop Henry off at daycare
  • Go for a run
  • Work
  • Do yoga & eat lunch or eat lunch & read
  • Work
  • Pick up Henry
  • Spend time with Henry
  • Henry’s bed time
  • Dinner and a TV show with Kelly
  • Read / play a videogame / write some code
  • Bed

In the beginning I was largely goofing off. There was a lot more videogaming and a lot less reading or running. After about two weeks I tried to mentally shift from a short-term vacation from reality to a longer-term attempt at normality.

For me, this is more or less working fine. I don’t mean to brag. Kelly & I are lucky to not only be gainfully employed but have a childcare provider still able to operate. I understand there are people whose lives are being absolutely destroyed under lockdown. I want us to return to normal as soon as possible. But given the situation we are in, I’m glad to have built a routine that works for me.

Even if Virginia lifted all restrictions tomorrow, I anticipate following this schedule for months voluntarily. I would not be surprised if I’m not in the IHS office again until 2021.

I’ve been meaning to write more during this period, both to document what it’s like for posterity and because I (in theory) have the time. I plan to write about:

  • My thoughts on the lockdown policies
  • Running
  • What I’ve been reading
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What I’ve Done With Salesforce

I work with Salesforce often. Salesforce is a popular CRM (customer-relationship management) software. In my day job at IHS, we use it to track our fundraising efforts. We also use it to track our programs and opportunities in higher education.

For a period, I focused my role at IHS on standard Salesforce administrative tasks. This includes user access, database structure, and workflow automation.

This work is important. A database is doomed to failure without a wise admin. I strive to go beyond the basics to deliver the best possible outcome. Here are a few examples of how I have do that:

List matching. At IHS, we send staff members to academic conferences to meet potential academic partners. When we have conference registration lists in advance, I run a query of our Salesforce database to see who we already know. This allows our team to reach out in advance, leading to maximizing the value of their time spent attending the conference.

Automated metrics. When I joined IHS, we were paying a vendor to track our social media performance metrics. This vendor logged into our accounts and entered this information into a form which stored the data in Salesforce. I built a tool that does this automatically by connecting to the relevant APIs (Google Analytics, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) This saved the organization money on the vendor and ensured the data was in Salesforce in real-time.

Connected Salesforce to WordPress and Workplace. This meant that when a client clicked a button that fit their existing Salesforce workflow, accounts were automatically created on their WordPress website and Workplace by Facebook platform. This automation reduces manhours spent on creating and deleting these accounts.

Pushed Pardot email metrics to Salesforce. Pardot is a marketing automation tool sold by Salesforce inc for integration with the Salesforce database. I’m not sure why, but there is no out-of-the-box way to see Pardot email performance metrics within Salesforce. I built an integration automation that accomplishes this by creating Salesforce records with performance metrics for each Pardot email.

Built Pardot lists using custom Salesforce fields. Pardot’s main selling point is Salesforce integration, but we found at IHS that we could not create lists based on a custom field for the Campaign Member object. I figured out how to do this with a Python script, which I wrote about here. This saved our staff time they were spending manually exporting lists from Salesforce and uploading into Pardot.

Built a Youtube integration. Last but not least, I have built a direction integration between Salesforce and Youtube for performance metrics. This allows you to connect your Salesforce database to a Youtube channel, create records for each of your videos, and sync performance metrics. I’m working towards selling this as a Salesforce AppExchange app.

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Radical Candor

I’m reading Radical Candor: Be A Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. In a nutshell, the message of the book is: Be honest. That sounds simple enough, but how often do you avoid being honest because it is difficult or uncomfortable? I know I’m guilty.

So far I have found the book helpful but unsurprising. Being honest makes sense to me. Giving people negative feedback before things spiral out of control makes sense to me. I already knew this.

As I thought about how I can be better in implementing the ideas of the book, I realized radical candor requires clarity of mind. You can’t give honest feedback if you don’t know your honest thoughts. 

Clarity of mind is something I struggle with. I like to plan and execute projects but I’m uncomfortable reflecting. I don’t enjoy introspection.

It can be tempting to not give negative feedback because you are afraid of the discomfort this might cause. I can think of times where I not only held back feedback, but my brain effectively tricked itself into removing my critique from my mind. Sensing there would be no utility in the information, my brain discarded it. I might be crazy, but I think the brain plays tricks like that.

So I’m not only thinking about how to use radical candor, I’m thinking about strategies for keeping my mind clear. As I previously wrote, I meditate regularly (well, I have let myself slip and it’s now semi-regularly). This blog helps too. After trying to write regularly for only a few weeks, I can tell you writing is a challenging but rewarding method for gaining mental clarity.  

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I Don’t Work In Politics

When I go home to Michigan or Chicago, I get some common questions from family and friends. The most frequent is: How do you like working in politics? 

In the words of Lucille Bluth, “I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it.”

I had one job in politics as a legislative assistant for a Michigan state representative. It was a pretty good job, a great one at the time (I was in college). I mostly answered emails from constituents and helped my boss draft legislation. 

When you work for a politician, you help them campaign. You also help them campaign for members of the same party. I had no interest in that. 

Politics is war. Now I don’t mind fighting, but there aren’t many battles worth fighting. As a general rule, politicians are amorphous blobs willing to do whatever it takes to ensure one thing: re-election.

We can talk about the separation of powers, how to interpret the constitution, the proper role of government, but at the end of the day politics is about gaining and wielding power. Nobody exemplifies this better than Donald Trump. Oh, and you’re kidding yourself if you think the Democrats are innocent of this. The weakest political criticisms are those of hypocrisy. People are hypocritical in politics all the time and there is no punishment for it. Political actors do not care about rules and ensuring those rules are followed. They care about promoting those of their political tribe. That matters more than procedural concerns.

I don’t work in politics. So what is it I do?

I have mostly worked at places that deal with ideas. I worked at a think tank, a student leadership network, and am now at an academic institute. The exact vision and strategy of each organization has been distinct. They all share the goal of fighting the battle of ideas and shifting the intellectual conversation which, in turn, would change the behavior of politicians.

If you have asked me this question and I have responded angrily, I apologize. I know you mean well. And I understand for most people, there is no difference between politicians debating policy and eggheads at think tanks doing the same thing.

Politicians have a seat at the decision-making table. Their power to create change is, in theory, vast. But they are so constrained by interest groups, public opinion, and political alliances their votes are often predetermined for them. 

Us eggheads admittedly don’t have that seat at the decision-making table. But it’s overrated.

Ideas matter. And breathtaking ideas, like those of Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, have amazing staying power. 

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Don’t Just Study, Practice

In my work on marketing operations for the Institute for Humane Studies, I am working with our fundraising team on an online advertising campaign. We have posted ads on websites where potential IHS donors might visit. When people click on our ads, they are taken to landing pages on IHS’ Learn Liberty website.

Landing pages are web pages designed to drive visitors to action. In this case, we want folks to sign up for email updates from Learn Liberty and make a donation to the project.

We are disappointed in the results so far, so we got on the phone with an agency helping us with the project. It turns out a decent number of people are clicking on our ads and checking out our landing pages, but they are not signing up for emails or making donations.

Why?

Our representatives at the agency went through our landing pages with us and pointed out a few changes we could make to possibly improve performance. These were pretty simple changes such as moving the email signup form towards the top and putting our calls to action in an eye-catching gold font.

I should have known better. In fact, I did know better.

As part of getting up to speed for this job I have been researching and studying digital marketing, including building landing pages. Having your calls to action easy to find and “above the fold” is basic advice I already learned.

But I hadn’t put it into practice. I hadn’t built a landing page for a real fundraising project before.

As I continue to do this work and build my skills, I expect I’ll make mistakes in building landing pages and other areas. At some point, the basics of building effective landing pages might become automatic so I can focus on testing more elements for best performance.

Studying will help you try but mastery will only come from practice.

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What I’m Working On

Three months ago I started a new job at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). My role is focused on digital marketing, in particular marketing automation and marketing analytics. So far I have found the work challenging, interesting, and rewarding.

Marketing automation is the use of software to “automatically” handle marketing tasks. For example, if a potential customer visits your webpage for a product but doesn’t purchase it, you can automatically send them an email with more information (assuming they have granted us permission to email them, of course!) Done properly, you can connect all areas of digital marketing: email, social media, websites, etc. I came in with the preparation for our marketing automation platform finished and was responsible for launching it with training and support. For the most part, this has gone smoothly and it is now used daily to great success. There are more powerful features we haven’t scratched the surface of yet.

Marketing analytics is simply the collection and analysis of marketing data. Working at a non-profit, sales can be a little tricky to define. While a sale is straightforward for our fundraising team, for our programs team it is a more complex question. At IHS, “sales” are more or less participations in our programs, such as PhD scholarships and research seminars. On this front, I have made progress in our ability to collect marketing data in an accessible manner. The next step is to analyze this data and use insights to improve our work.

At IHS we engage with students and professors around the country to encourage the study and advancement of freedom. If you look at higher education today, there is a dire need for the spread of classical liberal ideas throughout academia. I’m proud to be playing a part in furthering this mission while gaining valuable experience in marketing techniques along the way.