Category: Technology

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CRM Support

Naked Spectrum Consulting - CRM Support

Data management can be a drag. Tracking, logging, entering, rechecking, reports, dashboards OH, MY! What makes the task even more overwhelming to me is the actual place we house all of our data. CRMs are inevitably part of our everyday existence. The fidelity of our data will ultimately help us in so many ways from donor relations, to grant reporting, to getting a snapshot (or a deep dive) into the people that we are serving.  But our data is only as good as the people entering it, and only as useful as our ability to extract the data from our CRM.

If you ask the Google Machine about a CRM, it will give you north of 2 million results. Everything from “the 10 best CRMs for Non-Profits” to ads selling a particular make and model. Read those articles, talk to your ED friends, make a list (check it twice) and ask for demos.  Scheduling a demo is easy; send an email, get a calendar request and set aside 30 minutes to be dazzled. I’ve not participated in a demo yet that wasn’t impressive. But remember- the people dazzling you with all of their fancy graphs and tables are professional users of this CRM. Of course they know how to make all the fancy things work, but I’m sure they couldn’t tell you how to write a grant report with that data, or how to introduce shelter animals to foster care, or how to support a victim of wage theft get what’s owed to them.

Finding a CRM that fits for you and your agency can be a labor of love.  Go to any non-profit support page and it is filled with suggestions from Neon, to Little Green Light, to Salesforce and on and on. Ultimately, what you choose will be important to you and your mission.  Take the time to do multiple demos, and after, make a list of questions for each of them and ask for a follow up demo. The second one could be as long as 90 minutes, but it is imperative that you get all of your questions answered. Be sure to ask about specific functionality: Do you want to be able to make a scan/ID card for your participants to make data entry easier on your staff? Do you want to track case load by employee? Do you want to see how many times a participant interacts with your mission? Do you want to run a donor report that covers every cash donation, EVER? How about the user interface? Is it intuitive? Will it take an expensive TA package to get you up and running? Will it help you in creating the monthly Board report? Will it magically erase all of your data one day but thankfully, it backs itself up? Where is your data stored? And a HUGE one to ask EVERY SINGLE CRM rep you speak with….Who owns your data and is there a cost to extract that data if you decide to leave the software? Trust me on this one fellow unicorn, that last one is a very important piece of information to  get.

Have fun on your search. Don’t get them all jumbled in your head-because they can be very similar (especially since you are asking all of the same questions). Space out the demos and don’t ever feel pressured to purchase something you aren’t sure about. They will all be around in Q3 when you have that last minute tech spend down that you’ve been planning for! Many EDs have gone before you in the search, and many will come after you. Let’s have some fun while we change the world, enjoy a demo and some popcorn (call me, I’ll send it!)

PK

 

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Leveraging Tech

Moving my way through the non-profit world over the last 20+ years has really opened my eyes to something. Technology, in most non-profits, is sacrificed for the work of the mission. For many, the choice of buying a program participant a bus ticket to safety takes precedence over that lap-top we know we need. Being able to pay for another week’s worth of food for the shelter is more valuable than upgrading our Windows software.  We’re building our websites for free on software like Wix and Weebly because we really just want to have  a presence, but are we really considering the impact of that on clients, donors, and most importantly, on the image we are creating for the community we serve?

But what does having a web presence mean?  And what really is the harm in not updating our hardware and software? Well, let’s unpack these things and how they relate to our work, our missions, and the people and communities we serve.

Websites

Non-Profit websites have spent years playing catch up to the for-profit world. Relying heavily on free, or nearly free website design sites like Wix, Weebly and others. Not that there is anything wrong with using those sites, they certainly have their place in the sector. But as non-profits, what exactly are we leaving on the table by not designing EXACTLY what we need.  Well, I’ll tell you. We are walking away from:

  • Donors
  • Volunteers and ambassadors
  • Engagement
  • Meaningful Giving Tuesday campaigns
  • Annual appeal donors
  • Clients
  • Vendors
  • Potential board members
  • Future employees
  • Foundations

Having a website that is not optimized for today’s user means we are also leaving on the table the future of our missions.  Okay, well maybe it’s not that drastic, but when we neglect to take into consideration that as our society’s demographics are changing, so are their demands for how our websites perform. We now need them to be mobile friendly, incredibly fast, and easy to navigate. Millennials (and younger) want to be able to find things quickly, they want to donate with a text, and they want to be able to share your content, their donation and your information in a few taps on their phone.  Getting here, to this magical place of optimization, delightful user interfaces and fast loading mobile sites can feel overwhelming and over budget. But if you have clear goals, a set of audience priorities and stand behind the mission of your organization it can happen (on time and under budget).

So, what about that hardware and software?

We have to stop starving ourselves. Non-profit Executive Directors, frontline staff, and volunteers all deserve a good chair! and a computer that works! and software that was released in the same decade we are working in! Don’t let yourself believe anything different (don’t do it!) Let’s take a stroll back in time.. to a time when you were in school, doing that 20 page history paper in your college computer lab. Everyone used the same computers, inserting disks, saving, printing, taking their disk and leaving. Hell, we even had to format our own disks before we could use them! Do you remember that feeling when your disk corrupted and you couldn’t get ANY of your work? Do you remember last year when your hard drive crashed in the middle of your annual appeal? Or that time when your computer was SO SLOW that the donor who wanted some 990 information couldn’t get it? How about that virus? Did you lose control of any donor or participant data? I’ll wait while you think of the million other things that go wrong with our computers when we turn them on.

It’s hard to tell ourselves we deserve nice things, but we do AND we should plan for them. It’s ok to start with a small plan, maybe upgrade one computer and software a year as your budget allows, and make an intentional plan to replace all of it, and make an intentional plan to continue to upgrade every few years and soon enough everything in the room is working like this run-on sentence is.

PK