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hi everyone and welcome and thank you for joining us today my name is Kira I'm the digital events manager at connecting up attack snoops New Zealand connecting up in Texas New Zealand a part of the info exchange group and I'm for profit social Enterprise that tackles the biggest Social Challenges to the smart and creative use of Technology for those of you who haven't attended a webinar session with us before connecting up and texting new super New Zealand facilitates an annual trailing calendar of online webinars workshops boot camps and webcams to help the social sector upskill in all things digital check out our training and education menu on our website for more events coming up online sometimes keeping first for today all your lines are muted so if any technical issues please type your question into the questions box on the webinar panel and I'll be able to assist you if you have any questions during the session please also type these questions box and Stephen will answer the they're going to queue in our session at the end of the webinar we really encourage you to ask as many questions as you think throughout the session to make this as Dynamic and interactive at sessions possible remember no questions too silly but also not you covered some questions will not appear to an entire group if you're on a Wi-Fi connection and have multiple programs open this can sometimes affect the quality of the audio and video of your webinar if possible please close all your programs to help you have the best experience today note that this webinar is also being recorded and a link to the recording and the slides will be sent to you as soon as we can after the webinar ends but enough about that I'm excited to welcome today to finding the perfect CRM with Stephen Malley before we start I'd also like to remind you that there's a short survey at the end of the webinar and if you could take the time to complete this we'd really appreciate it thanks for attending today and I'll hand you over to Stephen thank you good morning or good afternoon depending upon where you're joining us from I just want to say a quick thank you at the outset for sharing this next hour with us um as as she said we do invite your questions so put them in the chat window and I'm going to save enough time at the end of the webinar to try to address all of your questions uh appropriately if for some reason we don't get through all the questions I will answer them in an email and we can send that out with the follow-up materials so just a quick introduction of myself my background is as a fundraiser in North America as you can tell by my accent um I was a fundraiser for um well I've been a fundraiser I shouldn't say was I've been a fundraiser for over 35 years um in North America mostly in the health care sector so I've worked for large medical research centers in North America in in largely the Boston area I started this company about nine years ago called fundraising force and the reason that I started the company is I felt very strongly that there weren't a lot of fundraisers who also knew technology so we offer two I guess branches of service the first is fundraising strategy and Consulting and then the second branch of service or second arm of service is all about technology so we help Charities find the perfect if you will technology set for their organization and we also project manage a lot of Technology projects throughout the course of the year thank you um in terms of our CRM searches I'm going to talk today about that process and that happens to be a product that we offer the sector but there are lots of Consultants out there that that do this type of of service I'm just going to offer you the best practices in terms of that service so here's what I hope to cover today I'm going to give you an overview of all the products in the market and there are lots and lots of products out there I'm going to talk about six common misconceptions that charitable organizations typically have when they go into a process like this I'll talk about who in your organization to involve in your search for the right technology set I'm going to offer you a 10 point CRM search process and I think each of these 10 points are really really vital and I'm also going to talk about what to do when you go to implement your CRM that's a whole nother webinar but I'll touch on it today and then at the end I'll give you a bit of a summary of all the key takeaways so in terms of the products in this market there are two types of platforms that you could obtain the first is a fundraising platform and the second is a CRM platform and they're very different first and foremost like it says fundraising platform really only focuses on fundraising uh functionality and that's fine that's necessary for each of our organizations but a CRM platform does a whole lot more so if your organization needs to implement a CRM organization wide you want to choose a CRM platform if your organization is only focused on tracking your fundraising functionality then you want to choose a fundraising platform it's as easy as that if your organization thinks ah we're going to start with just fundraising but eventually we're going to bring programs and services and and advocacy or what have you on then I think you probably want to choose the CRM platform to start with and grow into it now let's look at the products in each of those spaces the first space the fundraising platform space there is Imus which is a product that's put out by Advanced Solutions International or ASI Vega a product out of New Zealand but growing here in Australia thank you and then of course there's the blackbaud products e-tapestry Racer's Edge and Blackboard CRM on the CRM side it's less crowded there's clarity Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics so there's a real distinction in the market I'll tell you when I moved to Australia 15 years ago there were really only three players I miss thank you and Razor's Edge and today gladly the markets become more crowded so each organization has a lot of choice to make some organizations we work with say we only want to look at suppliers that deal with product a or we only want to look at product B and I oftentimes encourage them to look across the market because choice is Good Choice offers us greater functionality competitiveness and of course buying power and that's what we want so now I'm going to turn to those misconceptions and these are oftentimes things that people will say or think when they go into a process and I strongly discourage them the first is that I've got to buy quickly this is a really important decision that you're going to make it might be the biggest investment for some organizations and therefore take your time you are driving the bus throughout this process you're really driving the bus to the point that you sign the contract so take your time and make sure that you do your due diligence second I've got to have it all and I need it all on day one you don't you don't need to roll everything out at once you can roll things out in phases and in fact that's probably the best approach it's best from a change management perspective and it's also best uh for uh adoption learning and that sort of stuff the third misconception product a is the only one available not true anymore we've got choice in this market as I've just pointed out the fourth product B is the best available is it the best for your organization in a bit I'll talk about Gathering your functional requirements which is probably the most important First Step that you can take and um the best product is the best product suitable to meet your functional requirements it must be good organization X uses it well just because organization X uses product a doesn't mean that product a is the best suited for your organization again it's about your individual organization's functional requirements product c will work out of the box none of these products work out of the box anymore it used to be years ago and I'm going to date myself we would purchase software we would load a CD-ROM into a server and that product would um you know be loaded on various workstations and we'd start to train the team and use it that was out of the box technology yes some of these crms come pre-configured or configured to a certain stage but really what you want is a configurable solution that you can shape around your business processes you don't want anything that's out of the box and really none of these products are truly out of the box anymore the last one is I've used product D before therefore it's my favorite okay great you used it at another organization it worked well for you there but is it the best suited solution for the organization where you work at present so now I'm going to turn to who to involve in your organization I'll shorten this slide right at the get-go and say involve everybody but that's sometimes not really possible so let's talk about who to involve you need to involve a cross-section of your staff particularly if you are going to adopt a organization-wide CRM you want to make sure that you get buy-in from a good cross-section of your staff so don't just have yourself and maybe the it manager look at these Solutions really gather requirements from across the business or at least across the part of the business that's going to use the technology and then after you do that make sure that you're engaging others across the business and you're bringing them along on the journey also include varying levels of Staff it's not just the manager of or the director of that you want to involved in this process instead you want to involve staff of varying levels this is an opportunity to engage people who otherwise wouldn't be involved in a decision of such magnitude you want to involve leadership you absolutely need leaderships buy-in and you want executive buy-in from the get-go you don't want to exclude them or bring them in at the very end you want to bring them along on the journey just like the staff of all levels you definitely want to involve the finance committee of your board because they hold the purse strings right so you want to make sure that um what you're ultimately going to propose in the end will be endorsed by the finance committee and other board members okay now I'm going to turn to that 10 point process I'm going to first tell you what the 10 points are and I'm just going to go through them very quickly and then I'm going to focus on each and every one so you don't have to retain this you don't have to quickly write down notes remember this is recorded plus I'm going to focus on each one individually through the balance of the webinar the first one is functional requirements Gathering I said that this was an important first step and I'll talk about it in detail and how to do it number two market research number three invitations to the market number four request for proposals RFP five response meetings six proposals seven demonstrations eight negotiations nine selection and 10 a business plan for your board okay again I'm going to go through each one of these in detail as I do it ask questions in the chat window challenge me I want to hear from you because at the end we'll have a bit of a conversation okay first uh requirements Gathering let's talk about this process so here in requirements Gathering we really need to understand our organization internally we think we might understand the business maybe you've been there 15 years and you say ah I know what we're looking for it's important that you document each and every functional requirement that you're ultimately going to ask a supplier to configure in the chosen software leading up to that each and every functional requirement is going to have to be ultimately examined in the software you want to make sure that these important requirements can be delivered in the software that you're going to choose and in doing so we've got to document these on individual lines and a functional requirements document we need to be able to articulate these to the suppliers we need to ultimately as I said document those in individual lines in a minute I'm going to put up a screenshot of what my template looks like and there's a couple of examples in that template just to to guide you um you need to make sure that you understand your business processes if you are like 90 to 95 percent of the charitable organizations in Asia pack you don't have business processes documented that's a that's a must do but perhaps not right now because that will overwhelm you so this is an opportunity for you to say okay I need to book a donation ah within the donation I need to be able to book a credit card a check uh B pay whatever it might be right all of those different components will all be individual lines on your functional requirements document if that stuff is up in your head and the heads and minds of your colleagues you got to get that down onto paper to articulate that to these suppliers you also want to understand what data are we going to have to migrate is all of that data in our existing CRM or is it in 30 different spreadsheets most organizations don't have their data in a single location so you want to take a bit of an inventory of where that data exists to be able to understand what data is going to be migrated into the new CRM and what are we going to leave behind this is a screenshot of just a couple of rows of my functional requirements template that I use for our customers at fundraising force and you can see that there's a couple of requirements on there for high value fundraising first is a native ability to track loose Management in the CRM and the second is a dedicated space to track Financial details are publicly available Financial Holdings of a given Prospect you'll notice that I've documented that both of these are essential they're not desired or wanted they're they're essential and they're going to be in Phase One perhaps you'll have requirements that are just desired so they're not absolute must and maybe you'll have requirements that are in future phases so it's important to let them know what exactly are they quoting on and what needs to be rolled out now versus in the future you'll notice that I give suppliers four choices one this requirement can be met with configuration two this is a customization three this is a third-party app that will deliver on this requirement or four we can't meet this requirement at all all the supplier can do when we send this out to Market is put a tick under one of those categories and only one tick they can't give us notes about it they can't Resort the spreadsheet they can't give us two choices they can only give us one and that's so that we can go through and evaluate uh one supplier against another if they want to give us a whole story about it they put that in their proposal response and they reference the requirement number that is in the far most left column so that's our template you might put it in a different format but it's just important that you document these functional requirements number two market research so what do I mean by this it's important for us to understand the available products out there in the market I put some logos up on an earlier slide not every product is going to be suitable for your organization so once you document those functional requirements you want to say okay now out there in the market who should we take a look at and it might be two or three products three or four products whatever it becomes then within those products there are multiple suppliers that either sell or deliver those products so you're not limited to just a product there might be Choice within that product of different suppliers that will actually work with you to implement and that's a great thing because again Choice um uh implies competition which helps us with pricing which is important for our sector second under this category we need to decide whether or not we want to just look at fundraising Solutions or if we're interested in those wider CRM platforms and more and more customers in this market are going from a fundraising platform to a CRM platform the reason is that they want to again broaden it and perhaps implement it organization wide or in the future they might so they're thinking ahead and that's a great thing you want to conduct some initial research you don't need to do extensive research but enough to know what's out there in the market number three request for proposals so this is the second document that you're going to write you're going to do that functional requirements document and then write the RFP in the RFP um you're going to want to match certain things back to your functional requirements you're going to expand on them so maybe it's data migration maybe it's project methodology maybe it's project timeline maybe it's about the relationship that you seek in a supplier I don't know what it is but there'll be things that you want to ask the supplier that requires them to give an answer far beyond a tick box and so therefore we issue an RFP with various categories that are important for our customer and this RFP document might be 30 40 pages long I don't know how long it is but at the end of the day you want to make sure that you ask all of those questions that you want them to um to answer and respond in a narrative format you want to ask for elaboration on your fundraising requirements so maybe there's something about Integrations that you want them to expand on maybe something about the data migration that you want them to expand on at the end of the day it can be any of those it won't be all of them but there might be a few key ones that you want to pull out and ask them to elaborate on here is a screenshot of table of contents of a RFP from back in 2020 and this is similar to our ongoing template that we issue and use for our projects and you can see here that we're asking them to expand on their firm background their implementation team and methodology how they deal with customer service versus customer support how their product compares to others in the market etc etc so there are about 15 items in there that we have asked them to elaborate on that they couldn't do in that functional requirements document you'll notice that pricing is item 15 they hate to answer that question but they must we want to know what they're initially quoting this project we're not going to hold them to it but at the end of the day that is a comparison factor and it's an important one in our Market because money does not grow on trees all right number four invitations so you're going to issue two invitations the first one is uh to those in the market that you believe you want to send your pocket to and you're going to ask them in that invite letter um to um uh sign your NDA or your confidentiality agreement you're also going to describe what your process is what your timeline is you're inviting them to the table but you're saying to them that they um must sign your NDA in order to be opted into the process if they don't sign your NDA then they're indicating that they're not interested and that's okay it's not a required thing right you're inviting them you're inviting them to the party and so you want to set some boundaries in this document as well if there's a single point of contact identify who that is so that they're not calling everybody in your organization in fact identify that single point of contact up front and tell them that they can't contact anybody but that person for the processes that we run that's me and um we do that because oftentimes suppliers will try to take members of the team to lunch or dinner or out for drinks or offer gifts and that sort of stuff and try to influence the process and we want to keep it objective and neat and clean at the end of the day for the processes that we run at fundraising Force we don't care what solution you choose or which supplier you end up working with at the end of the day we just want you to choose the best solution for you and the best fit for your organization and the same should be true if you run the process set those boundaries up front all right I mentioned there's a second invitation and I should tell you about that before I go on to response meetings the second invitation is an invite to actually respond to the process so there's two invite letters and that's the second one and I've got templates for both of those as well all right response meetings what are those you've sent the RFP packet out to the market and now you want to have a meeting with the suppliers these meetings are traditionally optional meetings you've got two choices though that can either be one-on-one so if you invite let's imagine you invite five or six suppliers you're gonna have to have six one to two hour meetings if you're going to do them one-on-one or you can do them with everybody in one room at one time I'm going to talk to you about the pros and cons of each of those the pro or the positive of doing the one-on-one is that it's a blind process so um you know Salesforce doesn't know that blackbaud and Microsoft Dynamics are included and even within those spaces the individual partners that Implement Salesforce are Microsoft Dynamics or another product don't know who's involved in the process that helps you with negotiations at the end because they don't know who they're up against and that's a good thing a group process the positive is you don't have to have all those individual meetings instead everybody hears everything at once from you and everybody hears everybody else's questions and the answers that you give those questions so everybody gets the same information all at once the negative is it's not a blind process it's very exposed and therefore everyone knows who's involved and um you know would likely know their strengths and their weaknesses um as well everything in life has a positive and a negative you'll choose what's right for you we've done both processes for organizations whether it's a university a school a museum a hospital Environmental Group you name them um and uh I prefer the one-on-one and keeping the process blind until the very end because I think the organization benefits uh greater than Time Savings on my part doing group meetings but you'll decide the best fit for your organization again you're going to answer questions uh ultimately no matter which process you choose you want to respect the suppliers time they're investing a lot of time as are you in this process and you want to be very respectful of that supplier's time because they've got lots of these uh processes going on at the same time all right number six proposals so the suppliers will go away from those info sessions and they're going to craft a proposal and they're also going to respond to your functional requirements they're going to return back to you two documents a proposal and your original functional requirements document with the tick boxes the proposals will be lengthy and remember if you invite five or six suppliers to the process you could get five or six proposals back there's no guarantee sometimes people drop out for whatever reason during the process but you could get five or six back and so it's going to take time to review those who reviews them I recommend that you form a selection panel and that that selection committee or panel is an odd number of people just in case you've got a split decision it's like the U.S Supreme Court ultimately you'll get a decision and I would charge that selection panel with making a recommendation not a selection but a recommendation to the executive sponsor and you know leadership and the reason that I would phrase it that way most of the time leadership is going to endorse the decision made by this panel but at the end of the day um you know you um you want them to know that there are others um who will be examining the process you've gone through the due diligence and ultimately the recommendation that they have have made um you want to make sure that you accept all proposals on the same day at the deadline I usually say five o'clock on X date I don't extend that deadline some suppliers will ask for an extension don't extend it because otherwise it's not fair to those that do the work on time you want to acknowledge receipt of every single proposal remember this is about respect and respecting the suppliers time so you want to let them know that you've received it on time and it will be put before the selection panel you want to create your first evaluation form and you're going to evaluate the proposals against one another I typically list the key sections of the RFP and a one to five scale this is not the normal comfort zone for your selection panel so you're going to want to coach them and make sure that they um that they do the evaluating that they understand what their task is the great thing is everybody brings different perspectives to the table you want them to do this in isolation you don't want them to do this in a group they will be able to discuss it as a group for the first time when you have your selection meeting but at the end of the day you want this first exercise to be individual think and individual evaluations number seven demonstration so out of that selection meeting you're going to invite some of those suppliers to demonstrate those demonstrations are probably going to be about a half day and you might say oh my gosh you know four suppliers half day that's you know two full days it's worth it remember this is the top investment that you might make this year or maybe in the history of your organization so it's essential that you give them the time to demonstrate um these demonstrations are to a structured agenda it might be a free-form demo with a few points that you really want to make sure that they hit um but you'll offer an agenda and the reason that you want to offer an agenda is you don't want to create a circus like like environment so this will keep them structured and also keep your team structured remember whoever attends the demonstrations from your team must attend all of them because you're going to have an evaluation for the demonstrations and you want to make sure that everybody is comparing products a b c and d equally so you can't have some people come in and out or some people attend you know the sales force but not the Racer's Edge demonstration that wouldn't be fair um remember you need to Value again that investment of the suppliers time all right eight negotiations so your panel has made a recommendation uh now we go into negotiations and this is an interesting part remember that um you can negotiate so these suppliers are going to put forward um a price point and like buying a car or sometimes a house in certain markets um the list price is not always the best price and so there are certain components that you can negotiate and negotiate you must remember you're still driving the bus you haven't signed on the dotted line so you can negotiate with the um uh the uh sale the sales forces the black bods the microsofts of the world and on your licensing and you can also negotiate with the implementation partners and you should uh again you're driving the bus it is a very competitive environment the space has gotten a lot more crowded and thankfully it has so you can negotiate ultimately you're going to end up with a contract and many of our customers have a pro bono Law Firm that will review that and sometimes the non-profit arm of Justice connect will also review the contract for a charitable organization and I encourage you to seek legal advice uh oftentimes things will be caught that weren't part of the agreement that will be in your favor and so I encourage you to get legal review of those agreements all right number nine so now we're going to ultimately make that selection and ultimately get married to this supplier so we want to check their references they will put forward three references way back at the proposal stage and you're now going to contact those three references but you're also going to contact referees that they didn't put on their list and I think this is really important just like you might do in a hiring situation for a staff person check organizations that they didn't put forward find out about their strengths their weaknesses we've got a whole list of sample questions that we oftentimes offer our customers to ask um it's important that you have two people on these reference check calls because what one person doesn't hear the other one will one person might be taking the notes the other person doing the asking so you want to make sure that it's a free-flowing conversation and that you respect the reference time um you want to speak to former customers including those that you know uh left perhaps unhappy you want to uh dig for information just to make sure that you're making the right choice remember that suppliers just like a job applicant put forward the people that are going to say the most glowing things about them and that's fine we all do that at the end of the day you want to check others just to see if there's something there that you need to build into the new relationship that you're about to go into select the best uh platform and the best supplier partner for your organization don't necessarily um rely on the word of others but this is an important component just like it is in a hiring decision remember that you're going into a relationship not a transaction so many people out there view this as a transaction I'm going to assign this they're going to implement us and then we're going to use the platform and be happily ever after it doesn't work that way you are going into a long term relationship there are some suppliers out there that really value that relationship and see it as a partnership and in my mind that's who we want to work with number 10 a business case so your job's not done yet with this search process so we want to develop a business case to go to the board right so we need to sell this decision to the finance committee perhaps to the fundraising committee and ultimately to the full board so we've got to develop a business case you want to write a really solid one um we have um again a template that we use and um that template is shaped obviously for the organization but we know what must be in a business case we know what's going to resonate with people who are of a business mind on the board and therefore we cover certain things no matter what and then we add in the stuff that is tailored towards specific organizations a university is very different than a hospital or than a museum and we want to make sure that we have addressed all of the things that are important to a given organization remember your audience is the board and your executive leadership talk about the process that we've just gone through to get to this decision make sure they understand that it's been a very thorough process that you haven't um overlooked anything no stone has gone you know unturned here you want to make sure that they understand the due diligence that you've done include the true cost of ownership so remember that it's not just the licensing cost and the cost for the implementation But ultimately it's the ongoing cost that you need to pay attention to because the board will be investing for the project but then they need to know what it's going to cost over the next five to ten years to own this software and you want to make sure that you project you know increase in costs I will tell you that just about every software company has increased their price prices over the last 90 days um once one of them did it they all did it and everybody's costs are increasing and their costs have as well all right so just to summarize the ten point process remember there's this um requirements Gathering phase that's really important where you document those requirements and look at your data remember ultimately you're going to introduce some two documents that will go out to the market and that's the RFP and the requirements document then you're going to start to involve suppliers through the invitations uh the release of those documents and supplier meetings demonstrations negotiations and that contract and then we get to the important implementation which for some organizations can be four to five months others it can be up to two years it just depends upon the size and the complexity of an organization but the implementation is the next important milestone so when I talk about implementation remember I said earlier this is a whole webinar on its own and perhaps connecting up will book in a webinar Focus just on the implementation but the first thing that I say is that you need to start with your data and start early in fact you could start looking at your data while you're searching it's really important that you get your house in order in terms of the data and I recommend data inventory for that so take an inventory of every single piece of data that you've got out there outside of your CRM make sure that your data is in such a condition that it can be easily migrated a lot of these Legacy systems allow for Mr and Mrs records that's a No-No Mr is an individual Mrs is an individual or whatever the gender and makeup of a household is it doesn't matter a household is made up of more than one person one or more persons and they are not joint they might be in a relationship but at the end of the day they are separate individuals and they need to be separate records in your data set how many deceased people do you have how many um bad addresses do you have how many duplicates do you have these are the kinds of things that you want to get your mind around in terms of the data um you want to make sure that there's a precise scope of work going into the project and there's all sorts of project infrastructure that you can do even during the search process to get ready for that implementation you want to ensure that you've got a project team a steering committee and other teams to ensure proper participation across the organization engage a project manager lots of organizations say oh we don't have anybody who would have the time to do that or they say and or we don't have anybody with that level of expertise right and that's that's a fair thing most Charities don't hire a project manager to be on their staff full-time so there are plenty of us out there in the market that do this day in and day out I'm at a project today in Melbourne in user acceptance testing for their CRM and you know there are lots of us out there in the market that do this for a variety of organizations year in and year out I've got about 12 projects going at this point in time and that's what we do we juggle multiple things at one time but we've got systems down to get a project like this done and again I said there's lots of people out there in the market all right I'm going to sum up the takeaways and then we're going to open it up to the chat window for questions so I encourage you to put your questions in there no matter the size of the organization or type of organization no matter how silly you think your question might be we invite them we want to have a bit of a discussion with you so in terms of tech takeaways my first one is don't over buy technology I'm speaking to you through a MacBook Air right now I probably use 30 of the functionality on this MacBook Air I had to buy it as is but the great thing is with mac and a few of these other platforms you can add stuff to it as you need it and I encourage you to buy the technology set that you need to deliver on your functional requirements but don't over buy it you can always add functionality down the road number two acquire something that you can grow into so remember when we were little kids and our parents used to buy us clothes that were a bit too big because they knew that we were growing your organization is growing so I encourage you to buy something that is a bit of a stretch remembering that you can add on to it and grow into the future third ensure that your organization is ready for a project not every organization that thinks that they can take this on is actually ready for a project four know what you're looking for and um and where to find it and so that's about those functional requirements make sure that you define exactly what you need your CRM or your other technology set to um to deliver and make sure you know how to find that number five understand your requirements so a lot of these are about those functional requirements but that one definitely is next make sure that the suppliers understand your requirements so they're written in language that they'll understand don't use internal jargon that they're never going to be able to figure out next separate yourself from supplier influence one way that Charities tend to do that is to put somebody like us in the middle right and that defines boundaries and separates you from that influence but if you think that there's any bias or any potential bias just make sure that you draw the line because you don't want anybody ever to come back to say to you that you ran an unfair process or a biased process remember that you're not buying buttonology you're acquiring a relationship and I'd like to hope that that relationship is for the long term it won't be as intense as it is during the implementation but wouldn't it be great if you end up finding a true partner in the market who wants to work with you on a support sort of ad hoc in future phase basis and that's really what we're looking for here next if you feel like you can't take a project like this on hire a consultant out there to run the process for you it might be the best spent dollars as part of this process because it helps you to run an objective very fair process and most of the suppliers like fundraising Force out there in the market have these tools pre-built and we do this all of the time and we know the market we know uh the non-profit sector and so it's easier for us to be able to dedicate our time to it and you can do what you're meant to do in your day job last thing is you'll notice that I titled this webinar how to find the perfect CRM there is no perfect CRM what what we really want you to do is find the best fit for your organization based on your requirements and so what is perfect for one organization isn't necessarily perfect for another but um that's my my line there that there is no perfect CRM all right I'm going to open up to questions and as I do that I'm going to put my contact details up on the screen and I encourage you to reach out ask questions even if you think of them next week send me a text message you know an SMS or an email ring me I'm happy to answer your questions offline but for now I'm going to turn it back and take any questions that are in the chat window thank you Stephen and yes we have a question here do many crms on the market integrate with cash book systems such as myob xero reckon QuickBooks Etc yes thank you for the question and thank you for being first that's Brave of you um absolutely um it used to be that many of these products that um you know some of which are on the screen and some of which have been Sunset didn't integrate with anything or if they did they only integrated with their product well the world has changed and we expect our software systems to talk to each other and so you'll find that many of these crms integrate with Finance systems students systems patient systems membership systems you name it and absolutely the products that you mentioned um the the crms that I've discussed today some of them do integrate with those Finance systems some of them integrate a lot better with those Finance systems so that's something that you want to to look at as you study your requirements and study these products but absolutely is the answer to the question it can be done um I'm not doing here is it best to do a survey of similar organizations to see who they use I actually would would encourage you obviously to consider the process that I've laid out and not contact suppliers before you've gathered your requirements because it's a bit uh going in uh you know blind and you don't know really what you're looking for you think you understand your business you think you know what's out in the market but what if you're missing something what if you go out there and you look at some products you fall in love with one but you haven't gathered your requirements then you go to gather your requirements and you discover you need something else well then you got to go back out to the market so I think there's a sequential order here and I would encourage you not to go out to the market until you've gathered your requirements I understand that some do that and I also know that some of these suppliers are actively contacting um you know Charities doing cold calls to try to engage them I get it I run a business and you know we all have to do that however I think there's a sequential order and I would encourage you to just think about the process that I laid out today and whether or not that sequencing makes sense for most organizations all right um are there are there any systems that incorporate both CRM and fundraising platforms yes um so um I'll tell you that every product that I put up there whether it's a fundraising solution or a CRM platform every product would call themselves a CRM which I think is a bit of a stretch um the products that I put up on the fundraising side really do fundraising really well they don't do your fundraising but they track your fundraising very well and um you know kudos to them for delivering that piece very in a very strong fashion the CRM side not only track your constituents in a really rich way but um the three that I put up there also deliver on the fundraising side uh it's become such a competitive market that the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics as an example have had to develop you know fundraising specific functionality so it used to be that they rolled out just their sales functionality and they said here live with our terminology in the corporate sector live with our functionality and that didn't quite cut it so they've had to develop fundraising specific functionality in their CRM to speak our lingo and to also deliver on what's a one-off gift to regular gift how do we track major gifts trusts and Foundations corporates the whole works right the quests you name it and that functionality is becoming more and more mature sales forces is coming up you know probably close to a decade old and um Microsoft Dynamics has been out for several years uh in that non-profit space and because it's so competitive they're learning from each other three companies got together and created a common data model around the fundraising non-profit sector so they're all speaking the same lingo even though they compete with one another they're speaking in a Common Language and all of this helps our sector so um the answer is yes you can look at at least those two if not Clarity and they'll deliver on a CRM side and also on the fundraise inside okay um which CRM system would be best for a small organization just to manage donor database Communications and receiving purposes okay that's the million dollar question um my answer is not going to be very settling to you and that is I don't know and the reason I don't know is I don't know um all of your detailed requirements so those functional requirements are really important however um I'll say to you that you could be quite satisfied with products either in the fundraising space or on the CRM platform space and I'll tell you why um some of these CRM platforms will allow you to to expand you know grow as your organization changes and becomes more mature and takes more and more activities on therefore you'd be satisfied because you can grow into it using the example you know my mother bought me clothes that were too big um as I was growing up because she knew that I was growing um on the other side you could be quite satisfied with one of the fundraising platforms for a number of years uh just going into it knowing that you might have to transition to something else should you outgrow that functionality you outgrow those clothes you've got to buy um you know bigger clothes for the kids so that's the best answer I can give with the limited information that I just heard about your organization I hope that does help okay um the process you're at line makes a lot of sense we are small or medium-sized charity we do not have the time no the expertise in Heights so how do you recommend we can conduct such a process yes so um thank you for all these questions by the way and thank you for that question in particular I recognize that there are some small to medium-sized Charities represented on this call today and uh that's an important question um I think that uh a couple a couple of responses to you one um there are suppliers out there in the market that do this type of service um you know myself and and my competitors and I would encourage you to consider engaging somebody who does have the time and the expertise to deliver the process with you and I say with you it's like a fundraising strategy A supplier doesn't develop a strategy and hand it to you it's a partnership right so you'll have to still participate in the engagement but you're not actually coordinating the process you're not driving the bus you're a passenger and I think that that's um important it will save you time re resources energy and it will be done in a structured way whereas you know you've just recognized that you don't have that expertise the other thing that I would say in answering your question is this process works for small medium and large size organizations I've done this process for a very small organizations to staff people one staff person three staff people um you know under well under a million in Revenue five hundred thousand in Revenue so that type of space and I've also done it for very large universities International Aid organizations you name it that would be raising a hundred 110 million a year and have very large staffs as a result it works for the full spectrum of organizations no matter their size but I do hear your pain and I do think you need to find somebody with the expertise and the tools to actually drive the bus for you so that you get to the destination you must get to excellent um what sort of exciting new technologies do you see emerging in this sector um well I would be remiss not to mention artificial intelligence right it's in the news every single day sometimes multiple times a day for Better or For Worse and these um technology platforms are building AI into them and they have for the past several years but it's becoming stronger um and um you know that technology allows um for the um the types of things to be done to remind you to do certain activities to go and look for donors of a certain type um within your CRM based on their behavior and that type of technology is only going to grow there's a demand for it most Charities don't have staff that can spend the time finding the right prospects for the right type of gift at the right time and so that technology is only going to grow whether it's in um you know the the most resourced crms such as Salesforce and Microsoft or in these smaller products it's going to grow over time because the demand is there yeah definitely I agree um you did not talk about Finance systems marketing automation uh third-party fundraising software is this is the process you recommend similar when starting through those types of systems uh great question absolutely um you know replace the word CRM with marketing automation or third-party fundraising or Finance system or whatever it is uh patient system student record system I don't know what it is but um this process can be tailored for any of those systems and you can also do a multiple system search all at once I've got customers that will want to look for a new CRM marketing Automation and third-party platform at the same time um not all of the suppliers do all of those things so we will just do them simultaneously and tackle it all at once and then ultimately the same supplier might Implement all of it and the same project manager will oversee the full project for some organizations that's too much change all at once and so they'll take it in pieces but you certainly can take these tools and this 10-step process and use it for any type of Technology it will work foreign has anyone got any other questions uh before I let Stephen go today just uh pop them into the questions box if anything comes up I think you've had through pretty in detail there Stephen I think you've done your job well thank you I just want to say thank you to um connecting up for hosting these types of webinars there's such a service to our sector and um I also want to thank everybody for joining today and giving up this hour of your day yep perfect I've seen so thank you very much coming today and I will organize a recording to be sent out to everyone over the next few days and that will include uh the last slide there with Steven's contact details and also in the body of the email I'll send you Stephen's details as well so you can contact him directly and other than that thank you all so much for coming in thank you Stephen and hopefully we'll um get chatting and do another webinar soon in the year thank you have a good day everybody you too bye-bye