How to Prepare Your Nonprofit for a CRM Implementation
Table of Contents
Introduction: Building Bigger and Better
Forward-thinking nonprofits are building nimble CRM ecosystems that support organizational growth and adaptability.
Preparing for a CRM implementation is an opportunity to drive transformative change and propel your organization forward. Drawing from our extensive experience advising and managing numerous successful projects, encompassing strategy planning, full-scale implementations, and process optimizations, we want to share the wisdom we’ve gained to help you and your staff members navigate this change with confidence.
You want to approach your implementation as an opportunity for improvement and optimization. Don’t try to replicate past systems. Instead, embrace a fresh perspective on how you conduct business and imagine innovative approaches.
This guide is designed to assist you in mitigating risks, paving a smooth path through the technology transformation journey, and taking a strategic approach that will allow you to take advantage of new possibilities. Our goal is to help you maximize your investments, enabling you to stay focused on your core mission and advance your vital initiatives.
Before You Get Started
Assess Your Needs
Before diving into a CRM implementation, start by clearly defining your nonprofit’s specific requirements of the new system. Identify the key functionalities you need, such as donor management, volunteer tracking, event management, email marketing, and reporting capabilities. Understanding your unique needs will serve as a foundation for planning your implementation roadmap.
In some organizations, marketing and fundraising teams compete for budget. Others have “shadow CRM” systems to hoard their best donors. The result is inefficiency, inconsistency, lost opportunities, and poor constituent experiences.
Learn What You Should Budget
When considering the budget for your CRM implementation, we recommend seeking insights from similar projects undertaken by organizations like yours. Reach out to your peers or consult with professionals like us to gather specific information. This approach is far more effective and accurate than trying to anticipate all the intricacies of your project and constructing an estimate from scratch.
During the initial stages of implementation, it can be challenging for you to foresee all the necessary components of the project. However, those who have already completed similar projects have likely uncovered those hidden costs.
By setting your budget based on real-world projects, you gain a valuable perspective to evaluate the estimates you receive when you begin to purchase software and services.
To transform your business and to achieve desired outcomes, it is also vital to consider costs beyond the solution and technical implementation services. It is wise to budget for change management to smooth the adoption process, account for time and resources necessary to building a consensus in the decisions, and redesign of your business processes to maximize how you leverage new powerful technologies. These efforts require an investment but will also have a far greater impact on your business than the tools themselves.
Get Aligned On Goals & Success Metrics
New technology is an opportunity to transform your business and to build for the future.
To align on goals, we recommend gathering your leadership in a room to discuss in depth what challenges you hope to solve. This is not just a technology discussion. Instead, think about what you are trying to achieve overall in your organization with the different points of view representing their business units.
Once you know what results you are reaching for, you will have a framework to make confident decisions about which technology and process improvements to invest in to advance your priorities.
Establish a Clear Decision-Making Process
Changing your CRM can be a massive undertaking. Establishing guiding principles grounded in the values of your organization and being clear about the factors on which you will base a decision are key. Strike a balance between including everyone at the table while also moving forward with decisions. Determine who has the authority to make decisions and who contributes to those decisions. Consider how you will solicit input and build buy-in among the stakeholders impacted by the changes.
Is Your Data Ready?
Data strategy is critically important for a successful CRM implementation project.
It can be tempting to move every piece of data your organization has ever collected into the new system “just in case” you need it someday. But there are significant downsides to moving too much data (and moving bad data) into a new system. You may incur hefty storage fees to keep useless or underutilized information. Storing some data can even expose you to risks.
We’ve seen the market shift to placing greater emphasis on data certainty, which focuses more on accurate data over volume of data to help you build more targeted strategies based on how your constituents engage with your organization. While culling the data may initially seem difficult, migrating irrelevant, redundant, and otherwise unhelpful information is actually worse. Paring down the data will ultimately leave the organization in a better place.
Transition is also a good time to revisit your data governance processes—or take the opportunity to establish them if you don’t yet have them—and as you are integrating information from different systems to establish protocols for who is empowered to access and make decisions about data.
Implementing a new CRM at your nonprofit can impact multiple departments. Engaging leadership across departments at the beginning fosters buy-in and a sense of ownership. The insights and perspectives provided by these leaders are invaluable and will significantly improve the outcomes of your implementation.
The rest of this guide will be structured to offer different viewpoints from within your nonprofit organization, ensuring a well-rounded and comprehensive approach to technology implementation. We are providing a big picture overview. But for you specifically, think about your organization’s structure and that will help you dictate which departments and work areas should be at the table.
Transitioning business processes exactly as they exist today is a missed opportunity. When you invest in technology transformation, build for the future—improve, rethink, take advantage of efficiencies.
Quick Reminders for Leaders During a CRM Implementation
When you are leading a tech change, focus on alignment in business goals and expectations.
Technology implementation should be strategic. Have a forward thinking roadmap.
Change is stressful. Take care of your people, support them, and help them adapt.
Engaging stakeholders across the organization will bring different perspectives to the table to help you identify blind spots and opportunities and build necessary buy-in.
A massive technology transition is not about making lateral moves, it is about transformation. Keep an open mind to rethink the how and why behind business processes.
Do the due diligence and check the terms of your contracts and tools’ capabilities so that you do not incur unnecessary expenses or lose vital functionality.
Without clean, reliable, and actionable data, you will not see the results that you may have expected. Start cleaning your data and put in place necessary governance protocols before, not after, the implementation.
Your Partner for Nonprofit Tech Services
Heller Consulting is a leading provider of technology consulting services for nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions. Our team of experts specializes in helping organizations develop and implement effective technology strategies and ecosystems that support their missions and goals.
Our team is comprised of experienced and highly skilled professionals who have a deep understanding of the nonprofit sector and the unique challenges that organizations face. Our team helps organizations with forward-thinking and pragmatic advice to guide you through strategic planning, defining requirements, assessing and selecting the right mix of solutions, and hands-on support through implementation. We also support clients through change management and optimization of configurations and processes to make your tech stack work for you.
Whether your organization needs help with technology strategy, CRM planning, implementation, or change management services, we have the expertise and experience to help. We pride ourselves on delivering creative and effective solutions that support your organization’s mission and goals. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you achieve your technology goals.
