LOVE IT or LIST IT – CRM EDITION
LOVE IT
SPRING CLEANING – Just like a good spring cleaning will help you see your home with fresh eyes, start by cleaning up your current CRM. A great first step is to get rid of old or unused drop-down options. Start with the ones you use most often and tackle the task one section at a time. If you are a Raiser’s Edge or Donor Perfect client, use the code table/code maintenance listing and create a csv file. Be critical about each of your values. If you cannot REPORT on it, SORT it, or FILTER it, why is it in your database? I would strongly caution against keeping data “because it’s nice to have” or “we may need it someday.”
ARE YOU USING YOUR CRM EFFECTIVELY – CRM companies work very hard to provide additional functionality to your CRM. Explore those new functions and try to incorporate them into your workflows whenever possible. Think of it like trying to rearrange furniture in your home. Be creative. Sometimes, you can find new ways to use features you already have to solve other challenges. Bring in representatives from each part of your organization to provide their input. Seeing what users at other organizations are doing can help inspire you, so set aside a bit of time every month to follow any webinars or read the product updates from your CRM.
TRAIN YOUR STAFF – Your CRM can do a lot. If your staff is not entirely up to date on their training, and you do not have at least two people dedicated to learning the software, you are missing out on the true power of your CRM. Please spend at least $1,500 per year on your training budget for your primary users. Data management becomes more complex every year. Your data folks need to know more than just how to use the CRM. They need to know about your applications and how they work together. The list of tools is growing every day. I know there are some lean staffing models out there, but there are also great free or low-cost resources such as community forums and newsletters full of tips and advice. If you have not already signed up to our newsletter do it right now. Let us help you out.
TECH TOOLS TO AUGMENT YOUR CRM – Yes, you read that correctly. Your CRM is a huge investment. However, your CRM cannot possibly fit all the needs of any organization, big or small. It just can’t. Long gone are the days when software companies try to be all things to all organizations. The ecosystem of non-profit tools is growing exponentially every year. The most important tool for you to invest in is TRAINING FOR YOUR STAFF (right…I mentioned that already…but it was worth repeating.) Once your staff knows exactly what your CRM is capable of, look at some great add-ons to solve your challenges.
National change of address (NCOA). This system allows you to use USPS or Canada Post updates. Hint: Your direct mail team may already be running that list against NCOA. If so, make sure you pull those results back into the database!
Importing tool – so much data lives outside your database, from event registrations to volunteer tracking. Be sure that mission-critical data is brought over in a streamlined manner.
Marketing tools – Some of the most used ones are CRM specific marketing tools, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or HubSpot. They will all apply any unsubscribes or contact preferences the email recipient selects to the lists, but make sure you bring that information back into your CRM as well.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT – Rome was not built in a day; nor will your data management processes be. Much like that big house renovation, take each project one at a time. Throughout the process, consult with staff to get their input. Who doesn’t like to speak about a challenge…hands up. Communicate with your team when a change is about to happen, when it happens and after it happens. It will take a while to ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page, but it can help demonstrate how the changes will make their daily work a little bit easier.
LIST IT
I hope you didn’t skip the “love it” section because if your organization has made the decision to change, a lot of what is listed in the “Love It” section of this document should be on your to do list.
FUNCTIONAL SELECTION – If you are looking for a new database make sure it meets a majority of your must have’s. That means you have met with your team and have a list of the minimum functional requirements for everyone on the team. Your gift team might say they need a batch entry system for gifts. Your marketing team might say need a social media marketing tool. Fundraisers may want a suite of pre-built dashboards for their portfolios. This is all true, but your team needs to be prepared that the new system may not have the same look and feel of your current system. If it does what you need, you can figure out the rest. Remember, no CRM is perfect. Once you have documented your essential features, be sure the functionality of the systems you are evaluating meets at least 70% of what you need. No subjective decision making! Extra points if you prioritize your “must have” list vs your “nice to have” list.
REPORTING/OUTPUTS – Your CRM must be able to report effectively. Ask the salespeople to show you the most mundane reporting functionality. Sales folks like to show you flashy dashboards. It’s sort of like showing you a staged home. It all looks beautiful, but if your furniture is all second hand, your house will not look like the staged house. When they staged our house, our living room looked like the lobby of a Kimpton Hotel. Your CRM should provide access to as many output options as possible.
POINTS OF INTEGRATION – Modern-day CRMs should allow your organization to integrate with other systems. Bonus points to those providers that natively integrate. Please ask lots of questions about “integrations”. This term can mean many things to different people…so clearly define your needs. Do you want your fundraising data to travel directly to your finance system? Do you want your marketing data e.g. unsubscribes to come over into your CRM. Do you want to have a donor portal? Think about any of your tasks that require you to leave your CRM and go to another location to complete that task.
BUDGET – Much like moving in real life, the cost of a home is only one part of the budget. Other costs of migrating to a new CRM include appointing a dedicated staff person to this task, data migration costs, data clean up, developing new workflows, connecting external applications, staff training, and creating documentation (please invest in this piece!) Your staff will rely on training tools in the early days, which may have additional fees.
While looking at budgets, you must also budget for the time your team will need during this change. Determine how many hours a week will be needed during the transition and for training afterward. Most data staff are working at full capacity now. Will you need to bring temporary support for them?
DETAILS – the devil is in the details…. look at your contracts closely. What is your early cancellation fee, are there additional costs for email overages, feature or form customizations, or transaction fees? Are there different levels of customer support? Do not assume anything. Ask each vendor to provide you with specific benchmarks of what to expect.
From a budget perspective, trying to invest in your current CRM can have the best ROI. When a change is an absolute necessity, be sure to aim for OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE using the pillars of staff, process and technology. The team at Sentinel Consulting have been “loving” existing databases for over 30 years. We have also been helping organizations “list” and migrate to a new database – at last count we have migrated over organizations to various databases. LOVE IT or LIST IT we can help you begin a new relationship with your CRM.
