Should your nonprofit use a CRM?

How valuable would it be to have 33% of your time back?  50?

Small nonprofits often struggle to effectively track their information, events, donors, volunteers, marketing campaigns, etc.

Keeping track of information on spreadsheets, documents, sticky notes, and in team members’ memories can be complicated, time-consuming, and inefficient.

A customer relationship management (CRM) system may be the answer.

Does a CRM make sense for you

Short answer is yes (in most cases).

Here are some questions to help you decide:

• Are you able to manage your contacts in one place?
• Can you easily differentiate between leads and customers?
• Do you track behavioral data (i.e. did they open my text?, how long did they spend reading my email?, what did they take action on?, etc.)
• Do you track your sales pipelines?  Have you even defined them?
• Do your information sources connect to each other?
• Do you have real-time dashboards?
• Do you have workflow automation?
• Is your information backed up regularly?

CRM Benefits

There are a LOT of CRMs to choose from.  This means that you can find one that fits your needs.

Some of the key high-level benefits of CRMs are that they

• Simply your activities by having multiple technologies in one place
• Provide detailed contact management options
• Increase staff efficiency
• Integrate with existing systems (task management, marketing, sales, etc.)
• Are often mobile-friendly

Let’s go a little deeper and talk about some of the specific benefits available.

• Tracking contacts’ advocacy history (what issues do they care about, and what are their preferred methods for taking action?)
• Gift/donation history per contact
• Marketing automation (i.e., automatic email/SMS responses after signing up)
• Generating dashboards to show trend data and predict future results (predictive analysis)
• Simplified payment processing with pre-filled forms, recurring gift processing, mobile payment options, etc.
• Volunteer management through online sign-up forms, integrated fundraising, seamless communication, event organization, etc.
• Social media integration (i.e., social media advocacy, automated posts, ad integration)
• Email notifications (i.e., donations received, new lead, event registration, etc.)
• Create email templates for new emails and responses to common questions.

You may solve problems that you didn’t realize you had.

Not every CRM has the same features, so it is important to figure out what you want and, sometimes more importantly, what you don’t want. 

Common mistakes

Not considering a CRM in the first place is the biggest and most common mistake.

Here are some of the others:

Ignoring business needs

Be careful about choosing a CRM because it is what others have or it is what you are “supposed to” have.

Consider your business' needs and pain points. 

Ask questions like:

• How many lead/customer records do we have?
• What problems do you want to solve? (match with CRM features)
• What are our daily activities and sales processes?

Not involving your team

Your team members will become the users of the CRM, and considering their input will help with the decision-making.

Consider which team members will use the CRM software.

Consult each team member about their experiences with customer data and relationships.

Implementing a CRM without existing strategies for customer acquisition and retention

A CRM can help organize and automate your workflows/pipelines/funnels, but it will not create them for you.

If you are already doing business, then you likely have these processes, and this can be an opportunity to document them.

Paying for features that you don’t need

More features may not mean that it is a better solution for you.

More features will usually mean a higher price tag, and why pay for things that you don’t need or won’t use

More features can also steepen the learning curve for your team and make it less likely that they will use the software.

Conclusion

If you are managing information in multiple disconnected places, then implementing a CRM may help you simplify your operations and save time.

There are a wide variety of CRMs available today, so the key is matching your business needs with available features.

Determine what you want, involve your team members, and pay for features that you care about.