Discover the ideal deal crm for non-profit organizations

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[Music] hi everyone jake here from fulfill today i'm excited to be talking all things crm systems and databases with the director of fundraising force stephen malley steven's career began in the u.s of a where he's held furious director of development roles across multiple non-profit organizations before starting his journey as the principal consultant for blackboard during this time of eight years he would also found his boutique consultancy firm fundraising force um where it can where today he can provide an unbiased perspective on how to best implement a new crm system stephen welcome thank you good morning how are you yeah i'm good thank you so steven's coming to us from sydney so there's only a two hour time difference which is nice um but give us a bit of a background of your fundraising career to begin with sure well i've often times said that nobody um at least my age planned to fall into this as a career um and certainly in the 1980s when i graduated from university um i hadn't planned to become a fundraiser i certainly didn't grow up telling my parents that i wanted to be a fundraiser when i grew up and at that point in time there weren't university programs um training programs for fundraising uh with the exception of uh of of the one at indiana university so so i sort of fell into the profession it's the job that was available when i graduated in 1986 and and it's all i know it's all i've done since then uh so i've been in the field for 30 some years at this point in time um and um you know i've i've been a full-time fundraiser and also now a consultant for a number of years so so again i just sort of fell into it and and um you know it's my passion i covered in the introduction some of your director of development roles but when you look back at your leadership roles working inside a non-profit organization what stands out as one of your most successful campaigns or best success stories and what went into making this a success um well i um you know i've taken over uh positions where i had to grow the programs but i've also developed programs from their infancy and and and you know i kind of like both i like both gigs i like to take over programs where i can make my own mark and i certainly um you know enjoy starting things from scratch i find that to be a real challenge because you've got to put the foundation in place and build a house all at the same time so you know i would say some of the real successes are taking over programs that perhaps were floundering and putting my mark on them you know growing the number of donors growing the number of uh donations uh the amount of donations over time um i think are are some of the real key successes i've been part of capital campaigns um at hospitals in the us and those are certainly things that i'm i'm the most proud of um campaigns that span three to five years and are focused on raising hundreds of millions of dollars are quite are quite fulfilling yeah and when you think about when you think back to then about growing a donor base and um you know getting more out of your current donors as well what do you think contributed to that success um i guess it's um you know um building the brand of the not-for-profit organization as you're trying to attract those donors um you know um uh and also i oftentimes have said that with fundraising it's a bit of science and a bit of of art uh combined into one um and so i guess the the biggest contributor was um you know having the belief of leadership of the organization to to put those foundations in place to to build those programs that's um you know uh part of that success having strong leadership um who have a belief in what you're doing um but i think more importantly it's um having the right tools in place so you know uh certainly a crm that can help you to track activities um which is one of the things that i think we're talking about today um uh and you know other tools at the medical center in boston i was able to um you know rent lists and take some risks around acquisition programs that they had never done before and that were very risky risky at the time we didn't know how people were going to respond who were not patients of the hospital to an ask from a medical center in some cases that was hundreds of miles away and so it was risk-taking that i think was you know a key component plus having the right tools uh to deliver um on the job after your director roles you then transitioned into a principal consultant at blackboard so what made you transition into this role and what did you learn in your time at blackboard you know um i struggled with the ask from blackbaud to go to work for them because i haven't worked in the corporate sector uh since i had worked in um in the drive through at mcdonald's um in the us at the age of 15 16 years old as many american kids have done um so i struggled whether or not i wanted to leave a full-time fundraising role to go to the corporate sector and the reason i said yes um after the third ask was that i felt like if i was gonna go work in the corporate sector uh blackbaud was a good match because they only serve a not-for-profit sector so it was a good marriage for me um and you know at blackboard i have to say and i give blackboard a lot of credit for this blackbaud didn't have at the time bench strength of people who had worked in the sector and were willing to transition to go work for blackball and and so i was able to um you know apply my not-for-profit experience to the job and and that was a great match for me um after you know a year and a half or so with blackbaud u.s i got the call to consider moving to australia and it's certainly not a call i was expecting at five o'clock that day um and i thought about it and came over for a visit and i was hooked and came over on what was meant to be a a two-year assignment and and here i am in australia you know 13 years later um probably something you've heard from lots of people they come to this um this region and don't leave and so um you know just going back to the blackbaud um space when i transferred here i was really able to carve out a position for myself that helped me to continue to apply that not-for-profit experience and also build my own brand and and i was able to really carve out a role where i worked in the uk 30 days and worked in sydney 30 days and kind of went back and forth so i was 30 days over there and then 30 days here and then back to the uk for another 30 days and it was the variety that really attracted me to the role of consultant because i was able to work with hundreds of not-for-profit organizations schools universities you name them and that variety day in and day out was very attractive to me wow sounds hectic um but when you look back at your career at um sorry i say blackboard it's the accent coming in but um what's what were some of the more common problems that you saw non-profits having when it came to their crm systems yeah i mean i think um you know um organization so you asked me about crms common problems about crms are just common problems uh we'll go for common problems actually we'll save the uh crms and databases to a later question yeah you know i think um the shocking part is that a large percentage of organizations lack a strategic fundraising plan so i think they may have the passion to raise the money they may have the um the delivery model whatever it is that that organization does but they lack a strategic plan um on you know road map of where they're going to go over the next three years so i was most shocked at the percentage the high percentage of organizations that lack a comprehensive plan i think you know typically organizations are well-intentioned they have great staff passionate staff passionate boards but without that plan they don't have a roadmap where they're going i oftentimes say i wouldn't drive from here to you know um hunter valley let's let's um take somewhere close or newcastle or or um you know um the blue mountains without my gps i wouldn't go without a road map and and you know um uh i certainly wouldn't lead a not-for-profit organization unless i had a plan on where i plan to take that organization over the next three years so so that was my biggest surprise i think some of the challenges which will resonate with your um you know your viewers lack of budget lack of um you know ability to to deliver um is a big factor and i think we're gonna hear it more post-covet you know with budget cuts and mergers and the kinds of things that we'll probably see here so that's a that's always been a struggle but i often times argue that if you don't know where you're going how can you go to the board and and request an annual budget unless you can prove um you know what you intend to spend those dollars on and what the rate of return will be um for your organization so so the strategic plan is is utmost importance um for for any organization wow that's incredible to hear and it's a big problem indeed especially as you mentioned um now more so than ever um and in 2014 you started your own boutique consultancy firm called fundraising force and where you specialize in helping non-profits and fundraising teams with uh strategic planning as you've just talked about and making the most out of their databases and crm systems so what prompted you to start your own consultancy well um to be candid with you was a redundancy from blackbaud um i was made redundant due to economic reasons in 2014 actually um exactly seven years ago this week um and um you know i don't know um if you've ever gone through redundancy but um you know for those who have this will probably resonate you're devastated it's a it's a time where you go through a variety of emotions anger you know disappointment um it's a time of reflection and i thought i could either go back to fundraising full-time for a university hospital you know you name it or i could go work for a competitor of blackbaud or i can start my own business and um you know i was turning 50 at the time and um i thought if i don't do it now i never will do it and i thought about it for a period of time before that so i decided to create this business first i went away to new zealand for a few weeks of r and r and came back and and you know um uh hung up the sign and started fundraising for so i think the great thing about being made redundant is it does cause you to reflect and and look at what are your skills and what do you what do you what do you want to do with those skills and um you know i decided to create this boutique consulting firm that that would do you know fundraising consulting and also technology consulting and and um the the fortunate thing about my time at blackbaud is i was really able to build that brand for myself and and i credit blackbaud for that as much as as i you know offer myself a bit of credit for that black bog let me build that brand and it allowed me to transition into this business quite easily and so i'm grateful for being made redundant i certainly wasn't at the time uh but um you know because i was able to build that brand um the phone started to ring and the email started to come in quite quickly and i've never looked back um as a result wow that's incredible and well done to you as well um and as and with that i think um many small non-profit organizations um who are either looking to implement or make the most out of their current crm systems will actually take a lot of value out of this conversation today because you're able to give an unbiased perspective of systems rather than sitting down and talking to one person like a blackboard or whoever it may be so that's going to be really valuable to viewers and to begin this why is it important for fundraisers to have a crm system well um you know i would argue that it is absolutely vital for any non-profit organization to have a repository for information um first of all we've got a responsibility to our donors to track their donations wisely but we've also got a data privacy requirement to make sure that the contact details that we track about our constituents whether they're prospects or or donors are you know stored in a very secure manner so um and thirdly it's vital that we track every single activity with those constituents um in some sort of system that will allow us to measure that activity so i think it's about data protection it's about um you know tracking donors um investments in our organizations in a wise fashion and it's also about measuring our results um we can't um measure results in a sophisticated way in microsoft excel as valuable as that tool is um and that's where many organizations start is with excel we can't track that activity in a sophisticated way so we must have a crm it is the um non-negotiable for any not-for-profit organization yeah and how can small non-profits start to take the necessary steps to find the right crm system for their organization well you know first of all in asia pacific there are um you know many products out there when i moved here um 13 years ago i would have said to you at that point in time there were a small handful not even a handful a small handful of available platforms and today that number has grown and it may grow in the future it's become a bit more focused in that growth but it has grown over time and we're starting to see products come in um you know from new zealand and from other parts of the world and we're starting to see some products become more sophisticated and as i said the markets become more focused over time but i think the the the necessary steps to find that crm really start with documenting gathering and documenting your functional requirements what do you need the platform to deliver for your organization so when fundraising for us i mentioned that we do fundraising consulting as well as um you know um technology consulting and one of the products that we offer on the technology side is a crm search and and when we conduct the search with an organization we typically start with gathering those functional requirements and we do that through a series of workshops or or interviews where we asked the staff of an organization what is it that you need to do day in and day out what are your processes that you need to perform in any type of software and we document those in a couple of um key documents we write up a request for proposals an rfp and we also write up a functional requirements document and just simply put for people it's a it's a excel spreadsheet um that is um an excel document that is made up of many different um tabs a tab for each of your functional areas and we list each functional requirement on a separate row we don't give a ton of detail you don't want to overwhelm the market with this detail but it offers you an opportunity to state in a very simplistic way on each and every row what the crm must do for you the reason that we do that is it allows us to recommend to charitable organizations what platforms would be most fitting for them not every platform in the market is um fitting for each organization and so we put together then a list of platforms and perhaps supplier partners that um that they might want to consider working with we have the market knowledge of um available platforms out there but we also have the market knowledge of partners who work with the various platforms and who understand our sector not every partner out there has expertise in the not-for-profit space and um while we've got similarities to the corporate sector we also have some vast differences some unique um aspects to the charitable sector that must be understood by any supplier who implements the software so just in sum it's really about those functional requirements you've got to get them documented otherwise um uh you you can't go out to suppliers and say we you know we'd like to look at your software what will it cost um the answer to that is how big is i mean how long is a piece of string and is there anything uh that you see when you work with your non-profit clients what are the common things that they document and must-haves and what what are you often the things that they think they need but they don't actually well i think um you know as we're documenting them it's important to not overstate the requirements to make it look like it's a you know hundred thousand dollar million dollar project because um um striking that right balance is is critical um we you know we we caution organizations to not have champagne taste but uh but a beer budget and so we we do ask early on you know what are you thinking that you'll need to spend on a crm and that's very telling to us some organizations will say oh i think it'll cost us fifteen twenty thousand 000 to implement a crm and quite frankly there's not a platform out there or supplier in this market who can do it for that price point um so we sometimes have to reset expectations at a very early stage with the charitable organization most organizations have typical requirements around tracking constituents around revenue management those sort of things where organizations start to differ is based on their maturities so how long have they been around and how sophisticated is their fundraising program some organizations want to track programmatic activity in the crm alongside of their fundraising activity and so that's where they tend to differ but most organizations are quite common in their um uh you know tracking in their revenue tracking and those sort of management activities um some organizations want a lot of automation and so they you know they're they're um staff poor time poor and they'd like the crm to do certain activities in a more automated fashion an example is recurring giving so you know gone are the days that you or i would have to make sure that we are available on the first and the 15th of every month to upload a file so that those recurring donors transact on that day and deal with the um card failures gone are those days so now we can offer donor choice where the credit card transactions are transacted every morning at let's say 1 am and we can offer donors the choice of what day they're transacted so if i sign up today for a recurring gift for any organization out there i can say that i want my um you know my credit card to be transacted on the 26th of every month i think that's today's date um and um and the um the staff do not have to be present on the 26th of december when most charitable organizations are perhaps shot for the christmas break and so that automation is really important to organizations and it's also expected by the donors i expect to be able to choose the day of the month that i want my credit card transacted not um be required by the charity to have it on the 1st and the 15th because that's when they can staff it are you able to give an overview of a set list of uh crms and the benefits and the pros and cons of those crm systems available to non-profits yeah this is where you're going to get me into trouble um um so so i should say at the outset of this that fundraising force are product agnostic so we um do not um recommend any crm instead we believe that every crm platform in this market has its um has its real advantages and we're lucky in this market to have a variety a choice and so i want to just say that at the outset but let me just mention what the what the platform availability is in this market and i'll start with um fundraising platforms so so there are two um two distinct um choices in this market and that is a fundraising platform or um a true crm platform on the fundraising platform side you have um you know the razer's edge e tapestry and blackbaud crm all put out by blackboard you also have um uh imus put out by asi you have thank you put out by thank you um and you also have a product out of new zealand called vega so those are the fund-raising platforms that come to mind i hope to god i'm not forgetting one at this point in time that are available in asia pacific there might be others that come into the market in the future but those are the products that are available and you probably notice that that i haven't mentioned some names and that's because those products have been acquired by other companies and have been um you know sunset in in some regard then on the crm platform side you have salesforce and you have microsoft dynamics there are some others in the market but we typically don't see them playing in the not-for-profit space so oracle is an example there are some unis that use oracle but we typically don't see it in the charitable space so we don't mention them in conversations like this now something else that's important for your viewers to know is blackbaud in this market sell and implement blackbaud product so there aren't third parties out there that are in asia pacific implementing the blackbaud product there are suppliers like fundraising force who do uh participate in the implementations and we do training and things like that on razer's edge and what have you but for the most part only blackbaud sell and implement blackboard product um and that would also be true for the most part with ims and thank you uh and also vega as a platform so those fundraising platforms are largely manufactured sold and implemented by uh the company um who who market them that's not true on the microsoft dynamics and salesforce side in fact those two platforms are the polar opposite of what i've just described with the blackbaud thank you and um imsn vega on the microsoft dynamics and salesforce side those platforms are implemented by supplier partners so there would be a host of supplier partners in this market that um uh while microsoft and salesforce will sell you the licenses to their platforms they don't implement them instead they're implemented by the supplier partners and that offers some advantages and also some disadvantages so the advantages are you've got a variety there's a market there's competition um the disadvantages are that you've got to know who to go to and you know like every product not everyone delivers in a superior fashion and so you're dependent on selecting the right supplier partner who you can resonate with who you can work well with and who will understand our sector and deliver well for your organization so that requires a vetting process but i would argue that the same could be true on the fundraising platform side because you're dependent on the consultants who get assigned to your project and so um uh you know each platforms has each platform has its positives and its negatives and also um on that staffing side that selection side on on the fundraising platform because they are implemented by the manufacturer if you will and only by them you could be um i don't want to say stuck but you could be assigned a consultant who you may not resonate with but that's your only choice because they've got a limited bench strength whereas on the um crm uh side the platform side um you've got to select the best consultants for for your gig in terms of functionality quite frankly um each of these platforms compare well with one another in terms of the basic fundraising functionality so you know those fundraising platforms i think have got it down and microsoft and salesforce have now become more even with them in terms of their non-profit specific functionality so we're lucky in this market to have a variety of products and i would say to your viewers look at all of these options don't feel like you can't afford one of these platforms over a fundraising specific product because you can always negotiate price point etc and it is a competitive market so look at all of the products that are available yeah well thank you for that answers incredible insight right there um and how should the entire organization be involved in the crm decision-making process you know um i would suggest that you involve a variety of people across your organization now some people may say we're a small staff and in that regard i would say involve you know people from the programmatic side involve leadership involve you know whoever you can for larger organizations i would say involve a sprinkling of staff across the organization and the reason is you want to get buy-in you also want to get diversity of opinion across the organization so for example somebody who works on the programmatic side might not appreciate a crm the way the fundraising director might but they'll have some opinions they'll have some um insight that you might not have as a fundraising director so i would say it's important to form a selection committee who will be involved in the journey uh from the point that you gather requirements um through the point that we get to select who gets brought in for a demonstration through the demonstrations up to the point that you negotiate the contract involve a variety of people across the organization don't involve um a massive people though so um i would suggest that a selection committee should be no more than nine people and your smaller organizations i'm sure will chuckle at that because they may not have a staff as large as that um so so it's all relative if you're a smaller organization uh three to five people um would be um you know fine to involve i would suggest that you involve an odd number of people because this may come down to a vote and if it does come down to a vote um you know it's like the u.s supreme court there's not an even number of people on it for a reason um and and so um so that's why i suggest an odd number of people but i but i think it's critical to get that those diverse opinions and diverse backgrounds it's also an opportunity to involve people at a variety of levels across the organization you don't have to involve the ceo in your search but you might want to involve someone who is a receptionist or somebody who is a gift processor um and and that helps you to create change and involve people who might not be involved in decision making otherwise once a crm system has been implemented into an organization what's the first thing the fundraising team or the fundraiser should do and how should they conduct a project once it's all set up and ready okay um so so that's quite um quite a process to get to that stage um i think the first thing is to celebrate um when you get to that point in time because um typically just to give everybody an idea a search may last somewhere between two to three months um if you do it in a really careful measured way it typically takes about two to three months because we're not just dependent on our own schedules but you're dependent on you know the schedule of people across your team as well as you've got to be respectful to these suppliers they're responding to your rfp alongside of many others and you need to give them time to do that etc so that process takes you know two to three months and then an implementation for a small organization is typically three to four months and an implementation for a large organization can be a year or something of that sort so when you get to the point that you go live um you certainly want to make sure that the staff are well trained in the crm you don't want to set anybody loose on the crm without a certain level of training and you want to make sure that you deliver you know documentation a user guide training manuals you might want to record the trainings because it's not just a one-time experience you'll have staff turnover and you'll want them to experience um that training before you set them loose on the crm and at the same time um people may need to go back and refer to it um over time because people forget you know we're bombarded with lots of information every day so then thereafter it's critical that you also document your procedures and um you document those procedures in um two uh varied ways the first is a visual representation of the procedure from step one all the way through the end there are lots of programs out there to do that visual representation of a process it's important because more than half of us as adults are visual um we're not narrative in focus we don't deal well with words on a page and follow them well we have to have a visual representation the second way that you want to document the exact same procedure is in that narrative fashion because another percentage of us are narrative and not visual in nature and so you want to offer it both ways but you need to do that for every single procedure that will hit that crm and maybe for procedures outside of the crm so in some it's about training it's about documentation it's about retraining and then thereafter i would suggest to you that there's always room for improvement a crm is never fully baked if you will you're gonna constantly find requirements that pop up maybe that we didn't think of during a crm project or new requirements and so you're constantly keeping this crm refreshed and up-to-date after a year you might want to bring somebody in to have a objective look at it and offer suggestions for improvement as well and then another key thing that i think is really important is to offer uh you know sort of brown bag lunch um opportunities for people to come in and say i'm really having a hard time doing x y or zed and having an expert on your team who can help those individuals overcome those challenges because you want people to be the most self-sufficient as possible where have you seen fundraisers it might be linked back to what you've just said as well but where have you seen fundraisers missing opportunities to capitalize on the power of having a crm system within their organization well i think um you know one thing that i spoke about earlier was automation and so i think um many organizations don't realize the full capacity of the tools that they've got and you know um as a result they complain people love to whinge about their crm and um when in fact they're not using the crm to its full potential so i oftentimes use this example i have an apple um you know i've got an imac i've got a macbook air i've got an ipad i've got an iphone i probably use 60 um at best of the functionality on these tools why because i don't fully know what i've got here i've bought this technology and i'm using a certain percentage of it and the same is true of our crms non-profit organizations don't realize typically the full potential of that tool that they've got and instead they whinge about it it can't do a it can't do b and they um they love to hate their crm so that's the first thing the second thing is um unless you put information in the crm you're not going to get information out so i don't mean the whole garbage in garbage out that's certainly a challenge but um unless i put every single interaction that i have with a constituent i can't measure it i can't do anything about it and i'm not leaving a legacy because we've got such high turnover in not-for-profit organizations leadership ought to require anything that happens has to be reflected in the crm how do you enforce that performance reviews so people have an annual performance review that performance is measured by the activity that we put in the crm so if you don't put the activity in the crm your performance is going to be poorly measured on an annual basis because we can't measure it it's not in there so i think it's those things i think it's having an appreciation for the tools that you have maximizing those tools so pushing the automation as far as possible without losing personalization i think it's um you know measuring performance and telling your team if it's not reflected in the crm it's not going to be counted towards your performance um those are the things that i think organizations must do great answer and can you share a couple of success stories that you've that have come from the work that you do um in helping fundraisers better utilize their crm systems yeah i um one that comes to mind is uh whenever i do a project so i mentioned the crm searches that we do we also project manage um crm implementations uh for organizations it's not required when somebody does a crm search with us but lots of times they they see expertise or they they realize that they don't have the um the the resource on their staff to fully project manage an implementation so they'll ask us to stay on typically there is always at least one person on the team who is um technology phobic and that person is scared to death that they're going to erase the crm if they do one thing wrong and i think it's you know a success is being able to bring that person along the journey and making them feel very comfortable i oftentimes think of my mother in her latter years working for a hospital in um new mexico over in the u.s being scared to death of technology she was always afraid that she was going to you know goof up and and cause downstream issues and it's making that type of person comfortable with technology and leaving an organization with that person being one of the biggest champions on the team the other thing that i would say is it's um you know a success for me is watching an organization a year or two after go live um see their revenue increase see the number of transactions that they are able to um you know track in their crm double or triple from what it was before believe it or not investing in technology will um pay off um in terms of uh revenue increases and and the other results that follow but it takes hard work it takes an investment not just a budget dollars but it takes an investment of your team to get the job done and get it done right all of those things that i described earlier going through a successful project documentation training all of those necessary components will pay dividends and so a success for me is of course seeing an organization's revenue um you know double or or or the number of donors that they're dealing with double or triple because it's just easier they've got the tools to do the job yeah great and um on the increasing revenue increasing donation dollars you've touched on how crm can increase team performance which is in terms of invaluating your performance within a team but how can a crm how can a crm be used for an upcoming major appeal how can it contribute to the planning phase of a fundraising strategy um great question thank you um i think um one thing that struck me when i first moved to australia and this isn't an american being critical of australians i the thing that struck me was that um organizations would typically say um we do four appeals a year and i'd say why do you do four appeals a year and they'd say because we always have we just do four appeals a year and when i'd ask them how they segment those appeals they'd say we don't we send the same thing out to everyone so a crm in terms of an appeal will allow you to properly segment your audience and test treatments against one another to those audiences it'll allow you to create that segmentation in-house you don't need to pay thousands of dollars four times a year if you will to a supplier to actually segment that data slice and dice it instead we can create very rich segmentation within the crm itself um so from from an appeal perspective i think it's being able to properly plan the appeal uh um creating an environment where the appeal doesn't shut down a number of staff for many many weeks in order to get that appeal out the door and being able to segment the data and report on the results so that you determine whether or not you're going to continue to mail to donors who haven't given in the last 60 months or continue to mail to donors who have only given one time in that 60 months whatever the the breakdown is in terms of recency frequency and value so i i think it's it's um you know increasing your ability to better plan increasing your ability to slice and dice your data in a richer way and saving time so that that appeal doesn't shut down a number of people for many many weeks to get it out i feel like you know tax time christmas time these are times of the year that we ought to be able to get these things out very quickly without causing angst across the organization yeah great thank you for sharing that insight and what important trends are you seeing emerge in the crm space for non-profits i mean i think the functionalities become much richer um and more equal across the crms it's become a more competitive space and so the functionality that we're starting um to see is equal across the platforms i think the second thing is you know artificial intelligence is starting to become more prominent in these crms so you know some prompts that for example some prompts that you've not reached out to this pool of constituents in the last six months or something of that sort has become much more common in these crms partly due to the push of the the wide scale crm platforms being used in the for-profit sector and that technology is being offered to the not-for-profit sector and we're seeing those on the fundraising platform side having to adopt that technology um i i if i was in the charitable sector and i work for a charitable organization i'd keep my eye on what the corporate sector is doing um using technology because that will be coming down the pike on the on the charitable side you know over the next year or two yeah great and well we're down to the final question i just wanted to say quickly steven thank you so much for coming on for phil today to share all your experience and wide knowledge on crm systems and databases thank you thank you for having me what's your final advice to help fundraisers in their crm seeking journey yeah i think it's um you know uh before you take the leap to find a new crm look at what you've got today i think sometimes we believe the grass is always greener on the other side we've got some situations where heads of fundraising you know change jobs every 18 to 24 months and they've got a favorite crm they inherit a crm that perhaps is not on that favorite list and and they believe that they've got to change that technology i think it's look at the crm that you've got in place if you don't trust it bring in an outsider to review the technology and figure out whether or not it's fit for purpose for your organization before you take that leap to a new platform because let's be honest a crm search takes time and money and uh you know a crm transformation from one platform to another also takes time and money from your organization i think the second thing is be sure that you're ready for a crm project if you're going to take that leap not every organization is ready and they flounder make mistakes as a result of that and then the last thing is make sure you do it right make sure that your organization has the vision and the discipline in place to do a project in the right way