Empower your nonprofit with Cycle CRM for Nonprofit

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hello good morning we are going to be starting the webinar finding the right crm solution for your non-profit in about five minutes thank you all right good morning we're just gonna give another couple minutes and then we'll get started with the webinar okay uh well it is 12 noon eastern on the dot here so i'm gonna go ahead and get started uh let me just share my screen and we will start our webinar okay in this uh session is called finding the right crm solution for you uh first and foremost i want to thank you all for attending um i know you're whether it's your lunch time or you're starting off your day uh there's lots of ways you could be spending your time so i do appreciate you taking the time to spend it here with us um a little bit about me my name is reuben singh i've been in the crm space for about 20 years and at least half of which in the nonprofit sector i've been very very fortunate uh to work with some of the most impactful nonprofits in the country and i've learned a lot from my experiences but the lesson i'd say that stands out the most is that it does not matter how amazing the technology is that you're working with uh if the technology is not aligned with your nonprofit strategy uh if the solution is not rolled out in a way that resonates with your staff and with your organizational culture or if there's no clear link between the technology and the beneficiaries that you serve then ultimately the technology is going to fail and this is really why i started one temp consulting to not just implement crm uh but to work with nonprofits to ensure all facets are aligned in order to move their mission forward whether it's people process technology and all of which combined uh you know we accomplished this through our services as you can see below but enough about me enough about us and let's turn to the topics here in our agenda uh so again this is called finding the right crm solution for you i'd say that this webinar is intended for those who may be new to the crm space uh perhaps you've uh reached your limits with what excel or google suite can provide or maybe you're using a donor management system or you're looking to and you're looking to graduate to something more flexible or perhaps you're just looking to entirely overhaul your enterprise crm in whichever category you might fit in i hope you'll find something useful in this session uh here's what our agenda looks like we're first going to talk about crm what is it and what is the problem that we're trying to solve what are the systems that are out there uh designed for non-profits uh and you know i have something i call the crm spectrum so there's there's different sort of uh categories of crm systems for non-profits and pros and cons of each and then we'll talk a little bit about things to consider in your selection process as well as things to consider for your implementation uh we also have a q a that we're gonna do here so i'd say um uh we'll see how that plays out um but please do whether we whether we uh open up the lines or whether we just uh do it through q a on the chat but i'd say please do um put your questions in the chat and i will periodically stop and take a look and uh and do my best to answer those questions that you have in the chat and then we'll also leave a little time at the end for that as well all right uh let's move on here so with crm why crm what is the problem that we're trying to solve and i'd say as a consultant in when i walk into non-profits the challenges they face sort of resolve uh revolve around these types of things here there's disparate databases there's various systems various spreadsheets uh there might be one system out there for donors another application for project management and task management there might be another system for email management and email marketing maybe a spreadsheet for volunteers another system for advocacy uh and you know events might be tracked somewhere else and then a series of post-it notes and things that are in people's heads and as a result of this there's not a lot of knowledge sharing uh the most common thing i hear organizations is we have no idea what's going on so there's just this lack of sharing of knowledge across the organization there's also no constituent history when i pick up the phone and i call a donor call a volunteer i have no idea what all sort of activity has been involved prior to that conversation i'm not clear who already reached out to them for a donor or who already reached out to them to speak at a particular gala there's lack of institutional memory we're not really sure we'd have no history of the decisions we made things that worked things that didn't work and we're reinventing the wheel each time as we go along also having these many different systems lead to very tedious and very error-prone processes you've probably seen it before where you have one constituent in two different systems uh one of them mentions that or one of them notes that they are deceased so which do i believe is that in error do i run the risk of sending that letter out and embarrassing ourselves or do we just not communicate with them anymore so having many different systems to track information can cause problems uh but the biggest problem is uh we can't really measure things if everybody has their own way of doing things their own spreadsheets their own systems their own applications we have no real way to measure consistently across the organization our impact and our success so uh there is one article and i'd like to mention this it's one of the better articles i've read it's called it is excel making your non-profit mediocre it's by curtis chang it's in the standard uh stanford social innovation review and what i like about this article is uh chang compares a grocery store with a restaurant kitchen and by doing so he is comparing a spreadsheet versus a crm system uh and so i'll just tell you a little bit about the comparison he makes he says that a grocery store aisle and the shelves within a grocery store they resemble spreadsheet columns and that each shelf contains a certain kind of thing aisle 17 always has cereals just like column ac in a spreadsheet always has customer's donation date so everything has its place and the underlying structure doesn't change and the static nature of that spreadsheet makes it very easy to perform complex calculations as you've all seen in excel but the drawback with spreadsheets where it starts breaking down is when something changes and you need to track it so let's say for example you're pursuing a grant and it has its own life cycle or you're taking a major donor prospect through a moves management cycle where someone starts as a prospect then you cultivate that relationship then they become a qualified prospect and then perhaps after that there may be a stewardship phase after the gift in each process on that donor journey there might be a different set of people that they engage with different data to capture different processes to support so just like in a restaurant kitchen where things are quickly moving and changing one dish may have several chefs and several processes in order to take a simple bowl of raw potatoes and turn it into an amazing side dish at a fine restaurant so crm is like the restaurant kitchen so whereas the spreadsheet is static and individualized crm is very dynamic and collaborative and i'd say in 100 percent of the nonprofits i've walked into the aspiration is definitely to be more dynamic and collaborative uh so the solution uh i'm suggesting is crm uh constitu constituent relationship management you will see reference to donor management systems out there i i shy away from that because i think you know and i think it's frankly a term that's going to go away eventually because when you think of nonprofits and foundations and such it's really not just donors you're dealing with you're there's there's a ecosystem of partners of vendors or volunteers of other stakeholders so i think constituent relationship management is a more common term and one i tend to lean on and with this solution of crm what does it offer you it gives you a centralized database for your organization creates that institutional memory it gives you a 360 degree view of the constituent so i can look at any constituent's record and i can see when did he or she give when did he or she volunteer what events have they participated in what mailings i've sent out i have a full picture of that particular constituent your crm system can also facilitate your marketing communications whether that's digital communications or segmentation for your direct mail vendor all that can be started from within the system another advantage of crm is it implements best practices so let's say you're a fairly small or a new nonprofit and you don't really have a process for doing tributes or for soft credits or anything like that well the crm systems designed for nonprofits has a best practice in place so you can leverage the functionality that's there and it becomes your process or let's say you have a very unique model for fundraising and you need to create a best practice well that's a great way for you to build and configure that in the system and now everybody is doing things the same way and with everybody entering data now in the same way in a consistent manner you're now able to get insights from the system whether it's dashboards whether it's reports you can see the trends and patterns of your giving and your impact and really be able to make smart decisions from there um on your programming so these are some of which there are many advantages and reasons why people implement crm so what is out there there's lots and lots of crm systems that are out there in the market for non-profits uh i feel like every couple weeks i'm hearing about a new one that's out there um and so i'm going to try to help synthesize some of that data that's out there and help give you some ideas of what you might want to focus on for every crm system for nonprofits that i've seen out there they all have this core functionality so frankly if you see this list of things don't be too impressed you want to look beyond this every crm system should have the ability to add and track donations the ability to send out acknowledgements uh a way to track a donor's profile or constituents profile some way to track interactions with that constituent calls meetings notes to do's that sort of thing some ability to query and report on the database some mail merging function out for functionality let's say for thank you notes or end of year thank yous uh or end of year tax summaries that sort of thing and some form of integrated email mass communication tool just about every crm that you're going to find in this space is going to have all these features so it's really what happens beyond this list that's where you start differentiating one system over another so let's take a look at some of those things that you might want to consider so as you're looking for crm as you're looking to see what's the best fit for your nonprofit or foundation you might want to ask yourself some of these questions do i care about householding and this is you know if i have two constituents who belong in the same household do i have some way to link them together to report on them as a household and not just individuals do i care about duplicate management do i want the system to proactively let me know if there's a potential duplicate in the system and have some way of reconciling them is the system more constituent management focused or is it more donor management focused do i want to track volunteers and partners and vendors and other stakeholders do i want the ability to track relationships where one individual may be associated with another individual or might be associated with another organization and be able to track those relationships together and then gift management is a key area too every non-profit i work with has different types of gifts that they support so you have to ask yourself what is it that we support both now and in the near term long term and does the system support it pledges soft credits matching gifts tributes uh do i have you know hundreds of checks that i need that i need somebody to enter in a quick way and i can enter them in a quick entry batch do i support do we support in-kind gifts do we need to split gifts across different revenue codes do we offer premiums uh where you know you might get a tote bag or a mug based on a certain gift amount you want to think through all the things that's aligned with your fundraising strategy and make sure that the system that you implement has all those features and can support it and then this is sort of a more advanced list of things that you want to consider uh but again questions to ask yourself as you're considering a crm do we have a major gift cycle in which we want to track a donor going through the journey or prospect going through the journey of major gifts um do we have a clear moves management cycle that we like to take everybody through do we want to process gifts actual credit cards and have our recurring gifts processed within the system event management do we have galas or other fundraising events where we want to manage and track within the system volunteer management online donation forms peer-to-peer fundraising social listening tools that goes out and sees where information might be tracked uh about uh about your organization from let's say your twitter handle or where your donors might be speaking a little bit about your organization as well as any third-party apps these are the types of things that you want to look at and say what which of these things are important to us and will the crm that we're looking at support it so there's what i call a crm spectrum and the pros and cons of each uh as we go along the spectrum here um what i like to think of is that for all the crm systems that i've worked with there's some that fit more in a beginner category some in an intermediate category and others in an advanced category and these are not hard and fast rules you may look at some of my suggestions here and say i wouldn't really consider that a beginner i really wouldn't consider that advanced so this is just our perspective but know that some of these categories are a little loose in the beginner uh category these tend to be systems that are a little bit more donor and fundraising focused you won't see them get too much into volunteer management event management that sort of thing they track gifts and transactions very well it covers that core functionality list but you don't really have the ability to configure or customize anything specific to your organization maybe a few fields but that's it and the pricing for these beginner systems are by contact limits so it's fifty dollars for a thousand contacts in your system a month or it might be you know seventy five dollars for 1200 contacts uh so the pricing is done by contact limits in these intermediate systems and i call these all-in-one solutions you would see that the beginner solutions tend to have very basic functionality but allow you to integrate with with a finite number of apps on the intermediate solutions there tends to be less of that and all the solutions are sort of built into one survey functionality the form functionality the email functionality is all built into one system everything's in one place it's somewhat configurable and also allows you to do some very basic automation so uh you know for example if if a donor makes a gift over a thousand dollars an email gets automatically sent to somebody that's what i would call a workflow so some of these all-in-one solutions now allow you the ability to do some of that automation as well but the key difference here is these are all in one solutions you don't need to go out and try to find a bunch of apps to what you're looking for all the key features and functions that you need are within the system itself then the advanced category are more of the open source systems the open platform systems that allow you to configure and customize to your heart's content um it allows it has typically a very broad user community and developer community and usually has some sort of app marketplace that you can try out different apps to add on features to your system switch it out over time and uh you know really try to configure and customize the system specifically for what you need uh and the pricing is not really done by contact limits for these types of systems they're more done by seats so the number of users there's typically a monthly fee per user so as you can see as we go from left to right here on this spectrum uh you have more control uh but you also the costs tend to go up as you go from from left to right there so let's talk about some advantages and disadvantages so think about that middle and far right category here the all-in-one or the intermediate solutions that have a lot of functionality baked in the advantage is it's a one-stop shop you don't have to go shopping around for different features everything's in one place there's one simple pricing model you're not paying different subscription fees for different apps you don't have to worry about compatibility does this email tool work with the crm does this forms tool work at the crm what sort of problems might i write into it's all fully integrated and compatible it's very easy to use and intuitive and typically ideal for organizations that don't have a very expansive i.t shop and doesn't necessarily require like a technical admin to maintain it the open platform or more advanced systems the the pros to this are you can really select the features that you need let's say event management or volunteer management is not your thing well just don't really uh implement those apps or you can always add them on at a later time you can also choose best in class apps so you're not really stuck to whatever the system provides you you can use an email marketing tool today and then three months later if a better one comes out on the market you can add that one instead these systems also tend to be highly configurable highly customizable and they can also support needs beyond just fundraising uh let's say you have a very unique fundraising model or you have some programmatic stuff that you want to use the system for uh some of these open platform systems can be customized to support it for example i i work with a nonprofit that that also does use a food truck to serve free meals in areas of need and in addition to using their system to track volunteers and to track fundraising they also use the system to track their events so every time the truck goes out how much was the cost for each of the meals how many meals did we deliver so not only is it covering fundraising and volunteer management but it's also covering impact so with some of these open platform systems you can really customize it to go beyond just the basic needs and really make it specific to your nonprofit so overall these open platform systems give you a non-profit more control so uh let's talk about some of the systems that we've come across here at 110 that fit in each of these categories that we would recommend and why in the beginner category some of the systems i would say that these are things that you if you need to get up and running quickly perhaps you've never used a crm system before you're currently on excel these two systems would work well for you little green light and donor snap um little green light has all those basic core features that i talked about on that core functionality slide plus it has a finite number of apps that you can uh integrate with but all the essentials are there things like mailchimp or constant contact or formstack paypal so all those key things you need to be able to run a efficient non-profit crm is there i would say that little green light you know no frills the interface is very basic it gives you very limited ability to configure or customize but it does have all the essentials it has a very intuitive user interface and a very very active user community so the the smaller nonprofits i work with that use it they swear by it and and for roughly 40 a month to support 2500 contacts it's pretty affordable donor snap is another one i would put in this category it again has all the essentials um it does have a little bit more built-in functionality as opposed to a little green light so you don't have to integrate with too many third-party apps um but it does delve into online forms event registration forms and has a mobile app and has direct integration with constant contact in quickbooks what i also like about donor snap is it does have a more intuitive user import tool so if you're moving from one system to another or from spreadsheets it gives you a little bit easier more intuitive way to enter that data to load that data in uh and it's slightly higher price than a little green light for about 60 you can support it a month you can support about 2500 contacts um and this is sort of what a very simple interface of the dashboard looks like in little green light again it has all the essentials it has all the key roll-ups that you need summarized information um but you know pretty pretty simple interface though overall as we move into the intermediate category and this is a pretty wide range of systems here um i i i would start off with bloomerang and bloomerang i would say has very strong and intuitive email and online capabilities you can very easily set up an online form for donations or contact us or event registrations and also has a very easy ability to segment your data to send out mass communications via email their focus bloomerang is really on donor management and donor retention they don't stray too far away from that very minimal volunteer and event management uh very minimal ability to customize and configure you can add a few fields but that's not really their focus they provide algorithms to be able to measure a constituent's engagement level uh they audit your communications to ensure it's using very donor-centric language uh they have a built-in social listening tool that can monitor what's being said about the organization on twitter and they recently implemented a donor engagement survey feature uh which is pretty uh pretty cool so whereas some of these other crm systems focus on on breadth i'd say bloomerang really focuses on depth uh their focus is on donor retention and fundraising and a very nice intuitive user interface uh it's it's roughly around 200 a month to support 5000 contacts there's lots of different plans that i would encourage you to look at but this is just a rough idea in comparison neon crm is the other one that we often recommend in this area it's another full-featured system has probably more capabilities than bloomerang because it does dabble a little bit in volunteer management event management and peer-to-peer fundraising and also has some element of project and program management um it also similar to bloomerang likes to keep the features in-house you don't have to integrate with too many third parties and has a very similar pricing structure as bloomerang my only drawback there is the neon crm interface is a little outdated uh compared to bloomerang but uh thankfully it is something on neon's roadmap to uh to update and they're actually in the process of updating that and going to be rolling out a new interface pretty soon uh at these other two systems that we're looking at here donor perfect and roi solutions i would say is more geared toward towards non-profits that have a pretty involved direct mail program so sending out letters for communication and fundraising they have a lot more robust querying capabilities and you know mail coding capabilities as well donor perfect in particular supports all types of giving some of the more complex ones and unique ones you know membership capital campaigns plan giving endowments uh what i also like about donor perfect is it does track multi-currency and conversion of dollars so if you're taking in donations from other countries um but again as i mentioned i typically see donor perfect for for organizations that have strong direct mail needs roi solutions is is a web-based application but it is not cloud-based and again limited customizability but it does allow you the ability to add fields and codes but roi solutions their bread and butter is really around gift management they have very strong batch management control so if you enter and manage gifts in batches roi solutions is definitely a tool that you want to look at it has very strong financial controls and integrates really well within a group with accounting systems but again they don't venture too far off from that they're really focused on non-profit fundraising and marketing another unique element of roi solutions is it does have a data services offering which covers everything from database maintenance data analysis data pens ncoa again things that you would typically see for for a non-profit that is very heavy on the direct mail side of things so if that's your area of focus definitely something to consider and moving on to our advanced category oh sorry before i do that here's just a quick example of what a neon crm dashboard looks like on the top left and on the bottom right is a donor profile of a bloomerang interface and when we get to the advanced systems that are more open platform open source uh i would say that the leader right there in our recommendations is salesforce in salesforce's nonprofit success pack uh salesforce as as most of you probably know is the is the innovative crm platform that's hundreds of industries globally are using across nonprofits for-profits government so on and so forth and since it is a platform a sales force has built the non-profit success pack as an application uh that sits on top of the platform to give it a non-profit look and feel one of the key differences with salesforce's nonprofit success pack is it's where many of the other organizations that we talked about has product management organizations that make decisions on behalf of the product and what direction it should go what features it should include salesforce however is largely driven by the community so there's hundreds of thousands of users who give feedback on various forums workshops conferences development days and they contribute ideas to salesforce on the product roadmap uh so when i put this up on the screen some of you may have may have had mixed feelings uh some people i would say you know love working with salesforce and some people absolutely hate it and uh in my experience i would say that i've seen it fail miserably and i've also seen it completely transform organizations for the better the one thing to note here is that salesforce uh through its power of us program does offer 10 free licenses to uh registered 501 c 3 nonprofits uh you would just have to fill out an application for it um and uh and that really encourages people to go this direction of salesforce um the only challenge with that is i say it's it's a little misleading because some folks assume that because these licenses are free you just simply you know flip the switch on salesforce and it starts working and that's not really the case it also leads people to think that well you know if it's free licenses i'm going to save money with salesforce that's also not the case by the time you have added on a few apps and you have spent a little money getting the system configured and customized and data migrated over the total cost of ownership is is not much different than the other systems that we saw or maybe more so um but the the advantages of salesforce it really has all the non-profit essentials covered it has a very robust gift management side but the real advantage is you can take advantage of the app exchange which is just a marketplace of apps that you can add to your system for any function that you can imagine whether it's more advanced reporting whether it's surveys whether it's wealth management tools uh email marketing there's just a tremendous amount of apps you can take advantage of on the app exchange and also it's customizability so as i was mentioning before uh beyond fundraising beyond volunteer management beyond all the key core features uh it really allows you to customize it to do anything you want if you want to go further into your program management or your project management or any other aspect to track your impact you can really use salesforce and customize it to meet the specific needs of your organization the key thing here to remember is you really have to have the right expectations you want to invest some time up front you're probably going to need some expertise upfront to help guide you on the sales force path and perhaps an ongoing resource in an admin role if you're a larger organization i definitely recommend you you hire a full-time admin if you're maybe a smaller medium-sized non-profit you may be able to make do with a with an admin who's maybe in a part-time role or at least somebody who's dedicated to um to manage the system and so in and so those are our quick summaries again there's so many systems out there but these are some of the key things that we uh that we do recommend i'm going to take a quick pause here um and uh just see if there's any questions that have come from what we've been talking about so far so just give me one moment and um we will take a look at the chats all right and at this point i don't see anything so i will continue continue with where we were oh sorry i do see one here um do you think this is required to implement crm whether um do you think an extra vendor is required to implement crm whether beginner intermediate or advanced do you think implementation requires an internal team to get set up that's a that's a great question um it really depends i'd say that some of the more beginner systems um do not uh do not necessarily need an external vendor uh to implement and in fact some of them don't even offer those services so bloomerang for example really tries to give you a lot of the tools and neon crm tries to give you the tools up front um where and the documentation so you don't really have to have an external vendor implement the system for you um now the only exception i would say is for data migrations that's where you might need a little help because you understanding the back end of the database is a little tricky um so whereas i don't think you always need an external vendor to help you set up the system i would say that you do need an internal team to help you get set up because there's a lot of decisions that you want to make internally what do we want to track what features we want to use what business processes do we need to put in place what training needs to happen so these are all the types of things that you definitely want an internal team to help set up regardless of whether you need an external vendor or consultant to help you implement there was another question about uh an application not being cloud-based i think roi solutions was the only one mentioned so what i mean there is that this is a hosted solution it is not the data does not belong in the cloud um where you know let's say salesforce force for example has uh is cloud-based it is uh has servers that are shared across many organizations uh it's a um and really uh it could even be shared across different organizations but the information is secured so you one organization cannot see one system to another um but it allows for shared resources uh whereas hosted sites are really maintained by the uh by the organization so roi solutions solutions maintains it in what they call a private cloud so they have a little bit more control over it so that's a slight difference but every one of the other systems that i talked about are cloud-based um there are some questions here about do i have examples of why sierra implementations fail um if it's okay i'm gonna come back to that because i do have a slide that does speak to some things that you need to be prepared for um and really if you don't follow some of those things that's why i've seen things fail so if that's okay i will come back to that um for there's a final question here saying here for data migration what all things do we need to consider um this also will be coming up in my recommendations here for data for data migrations and things you want to consider before you implement um but i would say uh a key thing that you want to do is really understand your data you want to work on some level of deduplication and cleansing before you get too far into the system into an implementation and then you want to make sure that the volumes that you are working with can be supported by your crm so um so the excellent questions i'm gonna actually move on because again some of these points that are brought up are going to be covered in these next few slides but by all means if it's not covered then please do uh um mention in in the chat and i will revisit it but thank you so much for the questions then for engaging here let me go back on to the share so one second here okay um all right back to our slides so so things to consider as i mentioned early on it's really not just about the technology it's everything also around it that's going to make that technology successful so if you're in the process right now of looking for a crm system or you're going through a selection process or considering a selection process here are some things that you want to consider does the crm support your use cases don't just ask the vendor hey does your system have volunteer management because to them that just might mean a checkbox on the contact record saying hey this person is a volunteer that's not necessarily what you want you want to have specific use cases to say these are the things that we really need the system to do and have the vendor demo that information or those use cases for you uh you don't want to just assume that your assumptions or your interpretations of what volunteer event management is is the same thing that your vendor is thinking come to them with very specific use cases second and third item here very important you want to make sure that if you have any multilingual needs for your system uh that those are brought out up front or any multi-currency needs so you get donations from all over the world uh you want to make and you need to do currency conversions these types of things are not going to come up on their own in uh in demos so if you have any specific needs around this you're going to want to ask about it and ask specifically what you need especially for the multilingual is it really just the internal forms or is it the external forms is it the admin functions what needs to be what needs to support multiple languages and what does not um back to the data point that we brought up will the system support your data volumes without any performance degradation so i like to be as specific as possible when you're dealing with vendors you want to say here's my number of contacts here's my number of gifts in my legacy system i would take it even a step further perhaps provide them an extract of your data so they have are very clear on how it's structured and that way they can give you an accurate assessment and accurate estimate of what it will take to move it to the new system um does the crm support your current integrations and would third party what third-party apps would be extra so let's say for example you have an accounting system that's on a five-year contract and you're implementing your system right now you have to make sure that accounting system does integrate with your crm if it doesn't you know we have a problem and that's surely not a problem you want to cover during testing so if you have any integrations that need to be supported on day one you want to make sure all those things are brought out up front um and i also say here what third party apps would be extra when you're watching a demo everything is so pretty and so seamless it's not always clear well what was a third-party app so you want to make sure that you have a very clear idea on what was core functionality and what was some third-party app that i might need to pay a subscription fee for that way you have a clear idea on exactly what the total cost is going to be when you when you implement uh you also want to know when does your current system contract expire now you might be thinking to yourself oh i have a great relationship with so and so the account executive is very nice with me i'm sure that if i have to end my contact early they're going to they're going to be fine with it not always the case uh you know folks never like to see you go so they don't always make it easy for you so uh you want to make sure that you're not necessarily paying for two contracts at the same time and if you are you just want to be prepared for it so you want to make sure you know when your contract expires and so you can plan your project plan ingly and this this other point here about transferring sustainers it's a pretty granular point but i like to raise it let's say you have a lot of people who have recurring donations on your current system uh if uh you're going to move to a new system those donations those recurring donations need to transfer over and it's a little tricky on how to do it because neither system is going to store actual credit cards so if this is you know only a handful of recurring donors no big deal you just call call them all and get their new get their credit card number and put it in the new system but if you have hundreds of thousands uh you need a process to migrate it and this process could take months in getting that data from the legacy system so you want to make sure that you plan for that again i've seen some horror stories of this come up in the later phases of a project and causes projects to get delayed so it's always something to think about in advance on how to transition off your current system uh i think i've mentioned this point about here number seven about which apps are included versus requiring a separate subscription fee and then number eight does the system support your programmatic needs if you have any specific things that you want to track in terms of programs of impact that may be unique to your organization you want to raise that up front because a lot of even some of the systems i showed you today they're really focused on fundraising especially the ones on the the left side of that spectrum and don't give you the the ability to customize a whole lot so if you have specific needs you want to make sure that you uh bring it up early on in the process so those are things to consider while uh in your crm selection process let's talk a little bit about uh before you're implementing so let's say you've made a decision to proceed with salesforce or um or with donor perfect and you know you're about to get started in a week or two on your um requirements and design sessions and how we're going to configure and customize the system here are some things you definitely want to think about in advance first you want to revisit your fundraising strategy and draft a fundraising plan because you want to make sure that the system that you build is in line with your strategy and we build the metrics in place in such a way that you can measure are you achieving your strategy and are you addressing everything on your plan if those processes are not in sync you could find yourself a little aimless at the beginning so having a clear strategy at the beginning and building your system around that is always ideal the second point here is to invest some time in rethinking your business processes so if things are not working out right now in terms of business process and you move your broken business processes into a new system uh you're still not going to find much success so if something that you're doing is not very efficient or you think that things could be optimized let's say in the way you reconcile uh pledge payments with pledges or the way you communicate uh with major gift prospects whatever it might be rethink those processes re-evaluate those processes to make sure they're optimized so that when you move to the new system you're really building around that uh the third point and i mentioned this earlier about data migration is invest this time in data cleansing deduplication so again if you're deaf if your data is messy it's dirty it's people don't really trust it and you move that into a brand new shiny system um you you really haven't solved anything there because uh you know you people will just as easily lose faith in the new system and say hey this new system is terrible so i would strongly encourage investing some time in data cleansing deduplication making sure you have the relevant data only the data that you need to bring over and this could be an area where you might want to bring on a consultant to help you out because this could be a very tedious process if you don't have the right tools in place the fourth and fifth are pretty important as you you begin your discovery sessions requirements or design sessions bring all your key metrics and reports to the table you know think to yourself when i log into the system every morning what do i want to see on my dashboard what information do i want brought to me and those are the things that you want to tell your vendor or build in the system because that's what you want brought to you you want to be able to see those key metrics and reports otherwise it's going to be very frustrating to feel that you're entering all the stuff in the system but not seeing the things that you need out of it if there's certain ways that your leadership or management measures progress find ways to build those reports and metrics in the system uh rather than relying on a spreadsheet or word document or what have you the more that can be brought out of the system the higher the chances are that the user will adopt to it another point here is identifying key must-haves for day one i often think of gift processors here and uh if there's certain x y and z things that need to be done in order to process a gift make sure the new system can do x y and z last thing you want to do is roll the system out and find out you can't process a gift the way you need to um so if there's any key must haves for day one uh make sure those are brought from front and center and the system accounts for it uh in the first phase the sixth point here is to consider a phased approach so rather than do the big bang approach and and do the whole implementation and integration and data migration all at once we strongly strongly recommend a phased approach the crawl walk run approach um and i know this seems very obvious uh and everybody agrees with this concept but it's not always the way consulting organizations run um it's more advantageous for consultants to you know be there for a long time and a lot of resources and that's not always best for the nonprofit so i strongly suggest considering a phased approach perhaps you focus uh the very first phase on getting onto the new platform loading the data and having really basic configurations maybe a second phase uh turns your flat file integrations into real-time integrations and maybe your third phase adds on some additional features through different integrations and apps um so whatever however you decide to break it up it's always a good idea to phase out your implementation get user feedback after each phase uh get folks comfortable with it so that the the recommendations and the feedback they give can help you make smarter changes in the subsequent basis uh the the seventh item here and this is often overlooked is having a post go live plan ready uh you know everybody feels you know happy and relieved once the system new system goes live but this is really in my opinion where the real work begins this is where people have problems they have feedback they have they're wondering when the next round of updates is coming through so it's always good to have a plan ready a timeline ready a team ready to take all those uh items take the feedback and put together a plan for changes to be made for the next update when users feel that this system is living and it's breathing and it's it's constantly evolving to to you know our business it's a higher chance that they're going to be happier with the system and adopt to it and then the last point here it's probably the most important one is investing time in change management from day one you can't spend months and months implementing a new solution and then just roll it out with a day of training and say good luck you really need to engage your users across the organization uh really from the very beginning get their input get their feedback have them participate in testing have them uh uh participate in some of the demos to other colleagues uh you really want them engaged in the system to the point where when you roll it out there's no surprises they know exactly what they're getting what they're not getting and how the system is going to help them uh now and over time um so very few organizations do this well it's real it's a real science to this but organizations that really focus on change management from the get-go are the ones that tend to be most successful and um to the question that that came up earlier about you know why do some uh crm implementations fail number eight is it uh to me um that that change management process is not thought through perhaps you know it is working with vendors and consultants to build this great system and then they roll it out to the fundraisers and the fundraisers are not happy with it um they just kind of like the system that they had before it's it wasn't great but at least they knew how it worked um so i've seen amazing implementations and great technology just get completely derailed by not having that change management plan ready to go um the the other area where i've seen projects fail is around number six where you create this humongous one-year multi-million dollar implementation and it is so long and it is so complex and there's so much change all happening at once to the point that when the year is over the nonprofit has changed their needs are different um and so uh so this is why i strongly recommend that phased approach to really just get the key things the low hanging fruit the key things that people need for phase one get feedback get buy-in get some you know the change management issues worked out and then build on that from there having a strong foundation is critical to making the rest of the system work for you um so so this really concludes uh most of what i had here um on things to consider and for both the uh the selection process as well as the implementation process i'm going to pause again to take a look at any questions that we have so let me go to the chats in a second all right okay let me just quickly check here to see if we have any other comments uh oh so what is the sustainer sustainer is a and i apologize for for using terminology that that may not be clear uh thanks for calling that out a sustainer is someone who is uh making a recurring gift that is open-ended so it's let's say they're they're signed up for a monthly donation and it's open-ended you know there are some limited pledges out there where someone says i'm making a recurring gift for 12 months a sustainer is somebody who is making a recurring gift open-ended until they stop uh they choose to stop or or what have you so that's uh uh that's a sustainer um yeah and uh you know good question about razor's edge does razor's edge have a future uh seems like many non-profits are migrating away from it even though it's specifically designed for fundraising um you know i i have my own opinions on that i think uh you know whether it's razor's edge with blackbaud or whether it's salesforce both of these organizations have acquired other organizations to to build out their tools i just think salesforce has done a slightly better job of uh gluing things together than uh than blackbaud has and that's the kind of feedback that i get from from customers as they move away from razer's edge and into salesforce um you know a lot of the negativity around salesforce was hey it's not really built for non-profits but that's uh that's actually um uh that's actually what i find interesting is even though some of the innovations that salesforce comes out with may not be designed for non-profits it's also stuff that you can take advantage of um so uh you know i think sort of looking at things from a purely a non-profit angle may actually be limiting for blackbaud uh where salesforce you know has all these amazing technologies and features that come out that sales that nonprofits can take advantage of so i i no longer see it as a limitation that salesforce wasn't originally designed for non-profits and that's also what i see and hear from customers as they move from razer's edge to salesforce um another good question here about uh which people should be included in the change management.org oh goodness um i mean there are some organizations that that you know have change management consultants or hire change management cell phones to lead that but i would typically recommend a cross-section of people um in general anytime you put an internal team together for crm i represent i i recommend a cross-section so you know maybe somebody representing leadership somebody from program somebody from fundraising and somebody from i.t so whether it's change management or whether it's the crm implementation implementation team as a whole having that cross-section of resources where everybody's represented is definitely ideal um excellent thank you thank you all for these uh great questions and if you think of something uh later that you um remember at that point please by all means uh send me an email and i'm happy to to uh share my thoughts and so this really concludes our our presentation here i will say though that you know all these things to consider whether it's a selection or whether it's an implementation for some organizations this is very simple this is very straightforward for others it's not and that's where you need uh some help and this is where i would really recommend especially especially if you're going to go the open platform route in a larger implementation you want to have a trusted advisor whether it's a consultant whether it's a partner you want to have somebody who can help guide you throughout the process because it's a very it's an ever-changing landscape uh and and you know doing all the amazing things that you're doing as non-profits and focusing on your causes and your mission it's not always top of mind to be focusing on all these aspects of crm and technology so uh you might find yourself you know investing a little bit more up front with a consultant but overall it's really going to pay off over time so i definitely encourage you that if you don't have all the expertise in house to help you along this process uh consider a consultant um you know these are uh at one tenth these are things that we help with whether it's crm selection whether it's you know being your project manager your strategist or actually doing the implementation yourself or leading the training and change management side of things these are all services that one tenth uh offers um and i encourage you to give us a call if uh and see if we might be a fit to help you out and if not we're happy to make a recommendation to somebody who might be um and uh i'll i'll end where i started with gratitude and thank you so much for your time um and i encourage you to please follow along or continue to engage with us um you know even if you're not ready to make any decisions about crm i i encourage you to follow us on social media as well as our blog because we are constantly putting some content out there that might help you think about things about you know certain features that i might need or ways to approach a project oftentimes we do a feature spotlight where we might take one system and say hey here's this really cool feature and here's our review on it so please by all means follow our blog follow us on social media and hopefully there will be some nuggets of information there that will help you along your process and with that i would like to thank you all for your time have a great rest your day