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hello everyone and welcome to our webinar for October 20 19 entitled state of the non profit CRM market which is a part of our ask the expert series of webinars in this webinar to build Consulting's experts we'll be answering the questions you submitted regarding the CRM market for nonprofits you can read more information about this topic in our blog a link will be provided near the end of the webinar and if your specific question wasn't addressed during today's session please do contact us for an answer links for contact methods will also appear at the end of the webinar just a few housekeeping notes before we get started you can ask questions via chat we have of course some questions from registrants that we're going to be answering during the course of this webinar that we've pre-scripted but we also may have some time for Q&A at the end so feel free to post in your questions and we'll have to get some of them avoid multitasking you may just miss the best part of the presentation and as always links to the recordings and slides will be shared after the webinar if you've registered you'll receive an email with access to that information we've also started posting mp3s and transcripts a lot of these episodes make good sort of podcast listening as well so we try to make it available to consume in other ways just a little bit about build consulting before we get started here we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations we help our clients make data and tech decisions that support our mission their mission and we have a collaborative approach we really work with you integrated with your team which helps you to make informed choices that you can really own on behalf of your organization's we lead in the social good sector by providing five primary services assessments and roadmaps whether you want to assess your entire information technology landscape or just one particular area of need we facilitate software selections going beyond requirements definition to really understanding how new tech will change your organization and with implementation support we leverage our project leadership and change management to help align your state holder's policy operations processes and data so that you can really be successful with your new tech we serve as interim or part-time chief information officers for nonprofits working collaboratively with your leadership to create an environment that leverages data and tech to produce outcomes and with our outsourced CRM management we help take care of your data management so you can focus on creating stronger constituent relationships all of our services are designed to help clients transform themselves to better serve constituents of all types including funders donors program beneficiaries staff volunteers board committee members and the general public essentially what we want to communicate to all of our clients into the nonprofit community in general is contained in this formula which is o plus M T equals e o o or translated old organization plus new technology equals expensive old organization we really want to underscore that as much as new technology can help if the organization stays in the past while the technology moves forward it's not going to be successful and transformation is critical to your success and this is what successful transformation includes for build consulting and this is the framework that we apply to every tech project that we engage in on behalf of our nonprofit clients just some quick introductions my name is Peter Morris and I'm serving as the moderator for today's discussion I'm happy to welcome two of my colleagues from built consulting who will be serving as our panel for today's session these are Kyle Haines and David deal each of which have over 20 years of experience in nonprofit tech and CRM Kyle will you please take a moment to introduce yourself sure thing so this is Kyle I don't know who picked a picture of me where I forgot to either use too much hair gel or not enough hair gel that day but we'll fix that for the next webinar so I started in nonprofit tech as Peter said about 25 years ago and there's a couple reasons that I'm excited to be on the webinar today the first is I really like to talk so this is an opportunity to get to do that and then the second one is that for me when I get to talk about technology that direct impacts how your constituents experience your organization those are some of the favored my favorite topics to talk about so I really appreciate being asked to be a panelist today and I'm excited to hear what you have to say David and here also what you have to say Peter and David will you please introduce yourself Thanks yeah I am one of the founding partners at build consulting I'm previously the founder of community IT and chair of the board there my entire career has been in nonprofit technology I now work as an outsourced CIO for clients build consulting my first CRM selection was over 20 years ago at the time we probably would have called it a donor management system CRM software's come a long way since then and we're in the midst of maybe the most rapid innovation in CRM software ever so I'm really excited to share some of my perspective on that today so thanks for having me thanks Kyle and David now we'd like to share a little information about G registrants we did for the webinar we received twenty excellent questions in advance from registrants there were 90 registrants just over 90 registrants and we have thirty attending live today thank you for participating we gathered some information about you during the registration process one of the things that we wanted to share is just some of the CRM tools the different organizations that register for the webinar are using you can see there's quite a diverse set these are not all of the ones that were named in the registrations but some of them they came up more than once and then these are some of the types of roles that are held by some of the registrants for today's webinar and nonprofit organizations just so you can get a sense of who else is in the audience and what your peers are doing inside of their organizations student to the extent that the title ever really conveys what we do and we wanted to also give you a sense of the number of register the size of the organizations that are registered I'm you can see that the largest group is 1 to 20 employees but there's also some pretty large organizations that have registered for this webinar and will be our either attending or will be consuming the content after the fact so it's a it's a pretty diverse group but generally speaking mostly a hundred employees or less and we're hoping to just ask a couple quick poll questions here that you can interact with so we can learn a little bit more about each other before we get into the meat of the presentation and help us to also tune our answers a little bit more to your needs so I'm gonna be trying to go to webinar polling for the first time here so bear with me if it doesn't work out all that well so the first question is are you attending as an employee a representative of the nonprofit vendor or other just to get an idea of where our audience is at I see the answers are coming in now so it looks like we've got about an even split between nonprofits and vendors coming in and about 15% other maybe a few more vendors than non-profit folks so that's good and next we want to know if you are a non-profit this is a question just for the nonprofit's are you currently considering getting a new CRM yes or no see the answers coming in here give it another few seconds looks like a good percentage of the audience is is interested in at least speculatively and considering a new CRM and by that we mean you know both new entirely to your organization or to replace an existing CRM system so that's good it's good to know and then finally if you are a non-profit do you currently have Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM as part of your emphasis system well the reason we're asking this question is because it's it's helpful to know whether people are using sort of best-of-breed individual products for particular reasons or and or if they have some sort of broadly capable CRM platform in Salesforce and Dynamics CRM being two of them prominent ones in that space right now looks like about 27% of the nonprofit's attending have Salesforce that's no surprise if you have Dynamics CRM and that the majority of the audience don't have either so that's good to know thank you for sharing that information and now we're going to get to your questions and as we do so we're going to be answering them in the form of an informal collaborative discussion we're not going to be entirely comprehensive and our answers probably to any given question because of the format of this presentation but if you'd like again a comprehensive answer to a particular question or something that Suites more directly to your individual situation please do contact us and we'll be happy to dialogue with you we're constantly engaging with nonprofits in the sector outside of the context of client relationships so we're happy to do that just a quick framing question to get us started and a lot of people touched on this and what exactly do you mean by CRM so I'm going to answer this one this is the one question that I'm going to answer and as we all know CR can have a broader range of definitions where the sea might stand for customer contact clients or constituent and the term CRM might refer to a focused specific product or a broadly capable platform and so for the purposes of today's webinar we are referring to CRM as constituent relationship management broadly considered and at end constituent relationship management writ large and in constituents what do we mean by constituents well that could include any individuals in your nonprofits ecosystem donors funders volunteers service recipients program beneficiaries even staff etc so we're taking a very broad a definition of CRM as we talk about the state of the market so the first question from registering that we want to tackle is what are the major CRM product categories how should we sort of be viewing the landscape at a macro level and to answer this question I'm gonna turn first you Kyle and see how you would lead off and answering this question and we'll bring David and then get his thoughts sure thing yeah you looted to it actually in your definition of CRM and I think that when I started it was a fairly narrow definition but you as you said it's really come to encompass a number of different types of products but I think to simplify for today the way that I might think about it would be sort of applications that are Best of Breed so in the fundraising world those might be things like classy or donorperfect or the razor's edge and I think at the time that I entered the profession that was sort of your only option other than a custom option and then the second one which you alluded to or at least asked folks about in some of the intro polling questions or platforms and those things would be things like Salesforce which I think there are about 20% of folks on today's call who are nonprofits who are using Salesforce or increasingly Microsoft Dynamics and I think I also would include in that some of the applications that have and built specifically to work in Salesforce or specifically built to work in Dynamics that would work for specific parts of your organization and for me a platform what that means is that something has already apps that are built on it or can integrate with it and it also means that you can build your own applications on your own functionality on it but what it doesn't mean is that it's just an all-in-one application that does everything and I think that's something we try to remind our prospective clients and folks that we interact with that just by going to Salesforce or just by going to Dynamics it doesn't mean that it natively has everything that you need and that's how I think about the major CRM product categories I'll go ahead and add a couple two days Kyle you started to allude to what I'd call all-in-one applications and I think of these as being distinct from the platform Salesforce and dynamics we see this historically with CRM s that smaller organizations may use something like Zoho for example and we're starting to see it more commonly with solutions that target other nonprofits I'm thinking applications like neon or salsa or every action is a really interesting company that's making a notable play here to be an all-in-one CRM fundraising advocacy and marketing automation solution and of course it's been a common approach in the associations association sector for a long time with AMS software and then you know the last category Kyle you briefly mentioned it custom-built software we're really not talking about this too much in today's discussion it's really reserved for only the largest nonprofits the most unique situations and I'm really differentiating this from what I'd call semi custom applications that might be built on a platform like Salesforce of Dynamics yes they're somewhat custom but yes they're also accomplished through kind of configuration as opposed to really intense coding something you mentioned David I think that resonated with me that I think it's interesting is when you talk about custom-built software the in the increasingly infrequent infrequent times that I hear people talking about that and people really moving in the direction of either a platform or something like a best-of-breed application yeah good point I in fact I I can't say I've seen a use case for it any time in recent years yeah great thank you and the next question from the registrants were what's better an all-in-one product or a variety of solutions that feed into one database of record David why don't we go to you first with this one sure and I also wanted to mention that this was asked in some other ways by other registrants someone asked do you recommend using the same CRM for program data collection analytics and also sales and fundraising and someone else asked when our all-in-one solution is relevant so first I would just say it's really not an either/or between all-in-one or a variety of solutions there's also I put the platform approach as something distinct from both of those so we have Best of Breed we have platform and we have the all-in-one approach so I really think about those three categories and I would say you know it depends on the organization what do they have now for software how attached are specific departments to their existing software I will for purposes of answering this question assume that you know a non-profit that's thinking about making a switch you know historically many many of those have taken a Best of Breed approach that's historically been more common so how attached your specific departments to their best debride software how sophisticated is their use of that software so if departments use of the software is less sophisticated or they're less attached to it then I think a platform may be a good choice I will say I think in my experience it's generally a little easier to centralized consolidate your data on a platform rather than building integrations best-of-breed applications I think another instance in which a platform can be a good choice is if your business requirements are highly unique and inflexible because a platform provides the flexibility to handle these unique needs so most often this would be a solution like Salesforce or Dynamics CRM occasionally though you may find a Best of Breed solution that is sufficiently flexible to handle those requirements on the other hand if departments are attached to their Best of Breed software or if they use it in really sophisticated ways I would say look at options to integrate these best in breed solutions it really takes a lot of effort and time and cost to switch from solutions that are working really well for departments and there needs to be a compelling business reason to do that so instead of moving them off of that software look for options to integrate it so there are multiple ways to get a 360-degree view of your constituents not only the platform approach but integrating best-of-breed solutions is a way to do that there really a couple of ways you might go about that one is a direct integration between best-of-breed solutions you can use middleware products such as ricotta Mule soft as your logic apps there's one called fracture which is an interesting middleware Plus data warehouse options specifically designed for nonprofits you've got Ematic which is middleware for Blackbaud solutions zapier is a consumer-grade option that's really been gaining lots of traction and it's growing into a business class solutions so middleware is one way to go about integrating best-of-breed solutions and really the other option is the data warehouse approach so a data warehouse is something that pulls together data from multiple systems into a single location that's often used for analytics and reporting I mentioned fracture as an example before of nonprofit focus software that does this and there's something else really interesting is Microsoft's common data service which is a very interesting play in this area where data from solutions hosted on Microsoft Azure or integrated with Dynamics CRM especially if it's written to one of their common data models like the nonprofit CBM the nonprofit common data model solutions that are hosted there that integrate with that their data is made accessible to tools like power bi and I find that fascinating as an approach for consolidating data so I'll stop there the way I mean I think that that's all those are things some of those things I hadn't really considered in quite that light and I just if I can learn on this call whether it's zapier or zapier I know I will have come away learning something but I mean one thing that I think about is if I think about us for a specific organization and I think about the constituents that they interact with and I was thinking about a Venn diagram how many different departments share responsibility for engaging and managing constituent relationships and if there's a high degree of overlap for me as a general rule and as a generalization for sure I think that's a play for potentially an all-in-one product or a platform because it's critical that we all act in a coordinated way around a specific relationship if that impetus is a little bit if sorry if the overlap is a little bit less there's only a small set of relationships that we have a shared responsibility for managing engaging with and the impetus for having that information synchronized in real time is relatively low then it might be a play for a variety of solutions that really meet the needs of each individual department and then David you talked about a number of ways in which you can focus on sharing information and data between those systems I would you know in looking through the questions beforehand somebody asked a specific question about what's involved in the management of Salesforce and you know for those of you who are not familiar Salesforce that would be more of a platform approach and what we talked about before we joined the call was that if you are considering a move to something like Salesforce or Dynamics you need to think about who is going to serve as the administrator and consider outsourcing that either in a part-time way or with multiple folks depending on how big your organization is or how larger implementation is and then another question wasn't was specifically for someone who is new to Salesforce and what training might look like and I think it that really depends we talked about this beforehand but it depends on what your flavor of Salesforce is and one thing that we can say for certain is you'll want custom training that is built around how people work rather than a generic training that simply Orient's them to what Salesforce can do or what Salesforce does Kyle since we're talking about Salesforce here I'm gonna sneak in a question from the audience and that is what is the future for the NGO connect product within Salesforce that is a really good question and I don't know the answer but that's a question so David and I are actually gonna be at Dreamforce in November and that's a question that I'd like to ask of Salesforce themselves for those of you who are not familiar with NGO Connect it is a it is a product that was developed initially by a company called round corner and it has since been acquired by Salesforce and so I can provide some context but I don't have a really current update on what the future of that product is I don't know David if you do yeah you know I think I'll just mention here that there are several fundraising applications on Salesforce so whenever someone says they have Salesforce the next question is usually you know what are you running on Salesforce to do your fundraising it could be luminate CRM it could be cause of you could be a fennec west could be NGO connect and more and more recently it could be the non-pro that success pack so sales forces invested a lot in Riga years on building that up to be a more robust fundraising solution I think it marked a real change in strategy for them a couple of years ago when they really staffed up to build out in PSP and my impression right now is that all roads in Salesforce kind of lead to NP SP and maybe some vendors who aren't too happy to hear that but I feel like just the buzz in the community I feel like what Salesforce companies are leading with is really in PSP at this at this point yeah I mean I think I have a question about I think that's totally accurate and I think that I have a question about whether that ultimately serves the needs of nonprofits because there are other products out there but I think you're absolutely right that Salesforce increasingly has picked a direction and that direction is MPSP I will also that whenever NGO connectors come across my screen or my radar screen over the last couple years it's primarily been through orgs that implemented it and want to get off of it because it was such a bad experience or are looking to do some sort of fresh look reimplementation of it to try to get the problem sorted out so that's but that's just that's a limited sample I I will just add one more thing here that Salesforce says only I've only seen it as a fundraising solution in really large nonprofits on a few occasions it's a bit newer to that space and the ones I have seen have predominantly been NGO connect so that was their enterprise fundraising solution that they put forward for you know for some time now and I think they're really positioning in PSP to fill more of that role cool next question what are the key differentiators between the major CR M's these days why would I want one over another kinda let's go to you on this one yeah I um I mean another way to think about this I think earlier I talked about this idea of a Venn diagram I think another way that I might think about how how to differentiate various competitors would be first what is the origin orientation of the organization is it primarily a fundraising organization there is an organization that I serve as the CIO of that is primarily a fundraising organization more than half the staff works in fundraising and so that's a compelling reason to go in a certain direction in terms of the strength of a specific CRM solution in this case it's the razor's edge another organization fundraising might be only a small piece I can think of clients that we've had that have hundreds of employees and there's three or four people that live in fundraising because they their revenue sources come from government or from other sources and so for them I might move in a direction where the emphasis was managing relationships across departments and managing relationships in a holistic integrated way and so the other thing I might add would be if you're talking about fundraising specifically what's the product that's going to support the emphasis of your organization so if you're a major gifts organization it's going to be really important that that functionality is emphasized if you rely on events or peer-to-peer events those are going to be important considerations and if you're an advocacy organization that ultimately is leads to fundraising that might move that might push you in a different direction yeah so I think I'll add here just kind of extend what you said Kyle the the products are really built to support specific functions so is it built to do advocacy and organizing or or do they integrate with something else that provides that if you're looking at fundraising is at scale do you have a solution that supports complex multi-channel segmentation of your donors and prospects is it built to work with mail houses caging companies if I'm a school you know the the CRM I might look for as a school as a student information system and there are lots of options out there for that other differentiators is digital fundraising built-in for donation pages event registration peer-to-peer fundraising is marketing automation built-in or does it integrate with the marketing automation solution that you may already be attached to I'm also seeing SMS and tighter integration with that by different tools I'm seeing more social integration what does it offer for integration with Facebook LinkedIn Twitter etc and AI has been the hot thing the past couple of years how does a CRM leverage artificial intelligence to help with tasks like identifying prospects or tailoring your outreach to those prospects and then finally you know what does it look like to extend the CRM s capabilities to integrate with other solutions for things like program management or service management usually that either requires a custom build on a platform I see a lot of that people building out on Salesforce also Microsoft Dynamics 365 custom semi custom solutions to manage their programs or manage the services that they're providing or you can integrate with a purpose-built solution for Human Services case management for example eto apricot city core now part of me on one client track exponent case management things like this and then final thing I'll say here is how does it integrate with your ERP or finance solution raisers edge for example has tight integration with financial edge sometimes that's that uses something called o matic we often see salesforce integrating with intact or sometimes NetSuite and then Dynamics CRM has several integration options with Dynamics ERP solutions in general though we'll see this CRM to PRP finance integration utilizing middleware so I think a lot of vendors are really currently exploring how to more seamlessly integrate finance plus CRM Plus program data to really better relate things like revenue to costs to outcomes but really for now I think that takes a lot of blood sweat and tears whatever approach you take to those things it's kind of the Holy Grail then I feel like a lot of companies are after right now tying those three things together Peter Peter if I could just add something based on what you just said David I mean something that I think is interesting is when organizations in general are pursuing something like we need this CRM to integrate with our finance system in general organizations tend to do a significantly a significant amount of due diligence around that like we want to make sure that is going to work what does that look like who are other organizations that have done that but you mentioned something earlier around marketing automation which that holds some interest for I should say it holds a great deal of interest for me because it's critical that those that that system is well integrated with CRM because that really is the engine by which constituents are going to experience your organization it's how you are going to communicate with them and increasingly when you talk about things like social media it's how you listen to them and you have a conversation to is so the point that I probably am taking too long to get to is that many organizations take it on blind faith when vendors tell them that they have marketing automation solutions did they just integrate with their CRM and they make assumptions that those integrations are robust or well defined that hasn't been my experience and so I would encourage people who are listening today to spend equal amounts of time on those areas marketing and marketing automation as they would with any other system they'd want to integrate with CRM so I just want to hit on that point because I had a light bulb go off as you were talking I think that's there's a great answers and yeah a lot of my a lot of my clients where I've worked with CRM over the past I would say even five years are primarily focused not on the core not on the core sort of constituent record management functionality but how that relates to marketing automation including us pertains to outcomes measurement it's sort of being able to measure different checkpoints along the marketing funnel and see what's being successful and what's not as well as just the idea of increasing the fidelity of the data connection between the CRM and the ERP those are areas on which I've spent a lot of time so I think those are really good points yeah I think it's actually it's interesting the number of times that the marketing department is the driver to get a new CRM they're the ones who are agitating for it which sometimes that's very well founded and it's not a reason not to do it but again just make sure that the promises that a vendor makes around the extent of integration or actually borne out in reality mm-hmm that's a good segue into the next question which is how do I know if my organization could benefit from a new CRM Kyle yeah I mean that's that's a really good question and that's something I think what I would underpin and my answer is that for most organizations the answer to that question should be answered by the organization rather than by an individual department and so I would encourage that as any anyone was considering that that they engage as many folks as possible in answering that question but I might add to that that things that might drive me to recommend moving would be things like does it does by making a move can I actually tie that to better outcomes can I tie that to raising more revenue I in my experience making the argument that technology is simply out of date or something is new and shinier those aren't compelling reasons to make the move because there will always be something new and shiny I think that because these switches take so much blood sweat and tears it's not always a straightforward question to answer and maybe maybe I might say there are three signs your organization could benefit one is you're losing revenue or there's an opportunity to generate more revenue the second would be the organization is flailing or failing your constituents and it's not able to meet constituents where they are and the last one would be that you're a growing organization and the new CRM in order for do you grow it's incumbent upon you to make a switch but if those are but if the CRM is supposed to drive any of those things in of its own or on its own then that's probably not a reason to make a switch I'll just add I feel like we we do encounter a fair number of organizations that start with the specifics of what they want a new CRM to do and they want to immediately go look for vendors who promise that they can do it better they want to do demos get that new software and our experience has really been that when the organization can take a step back and answer not only why but most importantly what's the plan to benefit from this new technology those are the nonprofits that are the most successful at making an effective switch so that's where build starts when we engage with clients around a potential CRM replacement why do you want this what business value is it going to provide and what's the plan to really benefit from a new CRM well next question is oh this is a doozy how do I handle internal pressure from my organization to change our CRM system Kyle yeah I think that this I think as a CIO you're getting pressure to change everything from the computers that are deployed to people to changing systems and it's tough because that pressure comes from above you in terms of the board potentially pressuring you to make a switch they saw something they read something they heard from someone about a new software solution and it also comes from your colleagues and peers and from the people who are actually using the CRM solution and David mentioned and asked the question why and I think it's important to get to the why and once you answer the why I try to answer how are we gonna make this switch and getting the organization to understand that it is a sizeable switch it's a sizable investment of time and energy and that we need to spend time planning for it and for resourcing it these are not switches that people do in their free time at nonprofits I have not encountered anyone who's craving more work because they have a ton of free time and certainly as a CIO you're not in that position either and so I think that really answering the question about how you're gonna make this switch and defining it and resourcing it is critical and that's one question that I would ask of any organization and that can help alleviate some of the pressure that you're getting and I think the other thing that I'd mentioned is that oftentimes people view these solutions we need to move to Microsoft or we need to move to Salesforce it's we're gonna collaborate more on relationships and it's the software that has been the barrier to this and I haven't encountered many organizations where that's the only thing going on oftentimes there are other parts of the organizational DNA that are not supporting effective relationship management my colleagues have built know that I love analogy so here's one if my wife and I aren't communicating effectively I hope she's not coming home with a new iPhone with the idea that that's going to help us communicate more effectively it's some other problem and getting to the root of why we're not communicating effectively is the first step before we make any technology purchases or any organization makes one so back to the hint a question around handling internal pressure many of the organizations that we work with we introduce an information strategy framework that we use and I'm wondering if that wouldn't be helpful for the person who asked the question using our information strategy white paper because it actually prompts you to think about the things that need to be in place for technology to be successful and as you read it what you'll see is that we put technology last intentionally and I'm wondering Peter if perhaps in the follow-up after the webinar we can send folks a link so they can download it if they find it helpful but I use that all the time when I'm presenting my findings and results of my our assessments because it introduces all of the things that need to be in place for a technology change or a CRM system change yeah thanks and we just got to comment for somebody on the audience that said this is the fantastic webinar thanks for that feedback very much appreciate it was it David no my son tastes like you let my secret out so I think we need to start moving a little bit more quickly if we're going to make it to the end it's best if you want to have a little bit more time for quite questions but the next question is what what benders and CRM system should Mayorga know about what are the most popular CRM smooth mentioned a number of different types of products within different categories so far David what would you what would you add and answering to this question so I just want to say as a caveat before providing this answer that the market is changing so rapidly that I think it's really important not only not only to develop good requirements having a really good sense of what you need before you start looking but then when you do start looking for potential vendors do it through multiple channels talk to colleagues talk to peer communities do internet searches go to conferences the CRM solution you looked at two years ago may now be much better or much worse relative to the current capabilities of other solutions on the market so that being said I'll talk about some common solutions we see by category so first fundraising at large scale we will often see Blackbaud CRM BB CRM will see ROI ROI we will we were beginning to see some sales force in large nonprofits as well for fundraising scale for midsize nonprofits razor's edge has long been a go-to solution Salesforce can the Salesforce community seems to be converging on NPS P in my opinion but there are certainly other Salesforce fundraising applications there are a lot of options here and I'll just say please see our blog for more of the mid-market fundraising options when it comes to digital and online fundraising by which I mean donation pages peer-to-peer fundraising event registration and management some solutions are gonna have that built in and some C areum's are going to integrate with tools like classy teamraiser rally bound now a product of neon one-click and pledged donor drive Q give kind full or others I'll point you to another blog post there's a long list of those I feel like a lot of investment has been going in that space recently and there are a lot of vendors competing for your attention there but tons of options which I love it's a very market right now every action I'll say I mentioned them earlier they may they're making some very interesting moves as both an all-in-one CRM plus advocacy and organizing plus digital engagement and digital fundraising and as not only kind of that all-in-one solution but also as a digital engagement front-end for Salesforce and razor's edge so the reason I mentioned them is they received a large investment I think it was about a year ago sometime pretty recently in the big scheme of things they've made several acquisitions bsd tools action kit some some really strong software that they've required they now have hundreds of employees they're building out their solution quickly so I'm definitely following every action very closely neon I feel like has made some interesting moves after some VC funding led to the formation of me on one which then acquired civvy core which I'm familiar with for their Human Services case management their mentoring and their grant tracking and neon one also acquired rally bound which provides some of the online fundraising capabilities solutions for email marketing you know some of the solutions have this built in at this point if they don't and Salesforce and razor's edge do not have email marketing built in what do they integrate with do they integrate with MailChimp Constant Contact marketing cloud I'm going to point out even though marketing cloud is a Salesforce product it is not built into Salesforce it was an acquisition it's a separate product that is integrated with Salesforce but it is separate luminate online those are solutions that you might integrate with your CRM and then other solutions like every action they're building in email marketing and marketing automation it's also built into solutions like salsa neon and some others finally I'll just say for advocacy and organizing one person asked about options that work for organizations that do in-person community organizing and don't assume that our relationships our donation driven it's a great point I look to solutions like every action and salsa nation builder or other digital engagement tools that really serve as the online front-end and integrate with the backend crms I'm thinking solutions like engaging networks springboard soap box and then also previously BSD tools an action kit now both of which are part of every action so that's a lot of solutions by category I will we talked about Salesforce and fundraising solutions for organizations of various sizes and I think Salesforce has some great advantages including lots of companies that are building on or integrating with it lots of company systems integrators who can help you to tailor it to your needs as well as lots of end users people who are familiar with it who connect online and offline to find ways to leverage it better I think those are all huge advantages for Salesforce I think Blackbaud I'll just call out that they have an ecosystem of products for nonprofits of all sizes for fundraising and most people think of fundraising I feel like when they think of Blackbaud but also higher ed arts and theater grant-making religious organizations data enhancement payment processing it's really an all-in-one type approach so yeah that's just a quick scan of what vendors I feel like you should know about one of our audience members asked if we encounter HubSpot what we think of hopes buttons in the nonprofit space yeah I have not worked with HubSpot firsthand I have seen proposals for it at my previous company before build we considered HubSpot for a bit I think it's a highly capable tool I think it's also a significant investment but if you have really you know fairly sophisticated needs and want to tie some of your you know sophisticated marketing efforts into a CRM approach then I think HubSpot can be really helpful I don't experience yeah I mean I don't have experience with it and I think I've seen it once or twice as well I would you know just as a bit of advice I don't know if was embedded in the question per se but one of the things I think we often consider when we're doing selections is what is the ecosystem of support around a specific product so if an organization was considering HubSpot I would want to say who else is gonna stand with me who else has experience with this who can I rely on for support who who can I go to for custom development is there an active community around folks using it well those would be things that I would consider in evaluating something like HubSpot and that's not a comment on its functionality but more of a comment on how many of your peers are going to be standing shoulder or shoulder with you one of our peers from our audience has indicated that HUS butts really great for sales and marketing lots of online engagement tools but not really geared towards nonprofits and I think I would agree with that assessment it's offered offered by one of our peer experts from community IT innovators and another another attendee as well so we've got very limited amount of time to tackle there are many two questions so we're gonna have to limit our answers to a couple minutes of peace David and cut away are there two competitors to Blackbaud in Salesforce in the market and is Dynamics CRM now a viable option for a non-profit with fundraising needs let's see if we could get this one out of the way quickly so yes there are definitely competitors to Blackbaud in Salesforce and this is a great thing one of the competitors David mentioned earlier is ROI solutions they are oriented to organizations that do a lot of direct mail and David talked about a blog that lists lots of mid-market competitors so I won't go into those we've recently looked at I did a demo with every action we were shocked at how quickly they've grown both in size and in functionality and there's just a ton of options and I think that David talked earlier about ways to scan the market so just keeping my answer brief I think do go into any selection thinking it's a choice between Blackbaud and Salesforce and I would definitely encourage organizations to learn more about what's going on at Microsoft were intrigued by it we're trying to immerse ourselves in all of the fast paced changes that are going on there that seem really to be geared towards powering the social goods sector yeah no I'll just speak to Microsoft a little bit more even if you know that you want a platform approach to your CRM and and really Salesforce has been the only real option for about 90% of nonprofit use cases in my opinion for the for at least the past decade Dynamics CRM or Dynamics 365 from Microsoft is increasingly worth exploring even if you have fundraising needs we've we've seen a couple of products mission CRM Stratus Live that are built on Dynamics and because they're built on it it makes other tools integrated with Dynamics available things like classy things like power bi also I'll mention that I've heard of at least a couple of nonprofits who have integrated raises edge with Dynamics and I think that's fascinating the idea of using Best of Breed fundraising software raises edge alongside a platform dynamics that dramatically expands the list of what's possible there great thanks guys and finally this is a very Blackbaud specific question but it's an opportunity to come and comment on how black buds ecosystem is evolved or not evolved do we know of any third-party vendors that have made good use of Blackbaud sky API and I think this is this is one that really speaks to is Blackbaud fulfilling its promise of having a more open and integratable system for its products and I'll just start by I really want to credit Salesforce we're kind of setting a high bar here for the sector just in terms of the API and openness and I think Blackbaud has had to respond to that and I think they are responding to it and the sky API is one of the ways they're responding to it and an API is just a way for two pieces of software to exchange data between each other so one of them pushes data to or pulls from the other one so for example integrating constant contact with razor's edge or marketing cloud with Salesforce or things like that that's all done via api's yeah and you alluded to this Peter and I think in how you responded to it at least initially or at least framed the question the development of sky api has been deliberate it was probably the best way but most politic way of saying it they announced it nearly three years ago and that might as well be a millennium in technology time so I don't know or have any insight information on how they're making the API sausage but it's clear they don't make sausage quickly or it's really really complex sausage and I mean this is really just my personal view here the slowness of development of the sky API has really stymied the broader sector I know that vendors are waiting on sky API to build things that customers their customers and our clients would really really really like to connect to Blackbaud products and my experiences vendors have not been able to move quickly as they'd like and it's largely because of the really complex sausage that Blackbaud seems to be making you know another one in addition to constant contact I recently saw the paper save integrates with with the sky API so you can view scanned documents on through for example razor's edge NXT I haven't heard personally my clients clamoring for that functionality so that's an instance of where some of the functionality has been built out I'm not really sure that it's been built out to take advantage of the most compelling use cases out there here's for me something interesting to watch here because of the the pace at which sky API has been developed and because of the increasing integration with the Microsoft dynamics ecosystem and Microsoft ecosystem in general will vendors integrate directly to sky API or are they going to start integrating with Microsoft Dynamics you know which Blackbaud would also be integrated with and how will those things maybe be a little bit in competition are they - are they competing options are they you know how does that play out so that's something I'm interested in following over the coming months and years great thanks I want to honor some of the remaining questions that came in even if we didn't don't have a chance to answer them one and comments as well one person that's we're leaving Blackbaud exactly for this reason that we just mentioned alluding to I think the the the the seemingly slow pace and necessary complexity sometime in blackbaud develops its products particularly in how they integrate with each other one person comments that complex sausage would be a great band name or something somebody asked about civis CRM and its place within the ecosystem that's a good question one we don't have time to get to I'll just say my experience is that civis CRM has been to a large degree surpassed by other options available in the market and somebody asked a question about since many orgs are first drawn a Salesforce because they're free up to 10 users how do you explain to staff and leadership why there's a need to pay for setup and an administration like a beer yeah so those are all the questions that we have time for today but we really thank everybody for participating and asking the questions at registration and again if you have any questions for us that we didn't answer shoot us an email or contact us through LinkedIn our next webinar coming up is how data quality defines your organization and it's really an opportunity to learn how to talk about data quality inside of your organization as well as just to define what makes good a data good and sort of demystify that idea what is data quality how does it create how does good data quality or create measurable positive impacts for your organization and how does the absence of it detract from your mission the invitations to register for this webinar will be sent out to all newsletter registrants so if you haven't yet signed up for our newsletter please do so and finally if you want more information you can go visit our blog the learning resources on the site are aware the white paper the information strategy white paper can be found although we will post the direct link to that in the follow-up newsletter making the recording available and also again sign up for a newsletter built consulting.com slash newsletter and you can connect and continue the conversation through the contact form on our website through Twitter or through LinkedIn so that we're at time thank you so much everyone for participating in Thank You Kyle thank you Peter thanks David thanks David @ thank you guys take care of your window