Let me introduce myself: I have over a decade of experience in the nonprofit industry, most recently serving as the Chief Marketing and Development Officer for a $30M nonprofit. I led multiple teams in this role, including direct response fundraising and marketing, major donor development, customer service, database management, and broadcast productions.
Three years into my nonprofit career, I faced a pivotal moment—to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape, we needed to overhaul our CRM. After an extensive vetting process, we chose Virtuous CRM. I spearheaded the conversion and spent the next seven years as a satisfied Virtuous customer. My belief in the product and the Virtuous team eventually led me to join them as the product marketing director.
Reflecting on my journey, here is the advice I wish I had known about CRM management 10 years ago. I hope it provides valuable insights for you as you navigate the changing landscape of nonprofits.
Related: Why Nonprofits Should Change CRMs Now: Empower Your Mission with Modern Tools
Carly’s advice to Carly (and all the nonprofit fundraisers out there)
The world is changing, and technology is evolving, and as that occurs, you are spending so much time doing unnecessary tasks. You have a big job with a lot of responsibilities, and you don’t have time to waste.
The amount of time you may be spending working with your current CRM on a two-way sync between multiple systems is a waste of time, and it’s never going to work out. You might spend years trying to get the data to sync with no success. Those are years you could have spent scaling your organization’s marketing and fundraising with the right tools.
The promises you may have been told about your CRM’s product roadmap just aren’t true. You may be waiting for a certain update, but it’s not going to happen. The product most likely isn’t going to change and there won’t be any new innovative features.
The system you’re using probably isn’t going to get easier to use. It will continue to be hard to navigate, implement new processes, and train new employees.
Most likely, there will be no ability to develop or customize any features for your organization’s needs.
I know you’re optimistic and looking for ways forward, but eventually, you will probably have to leave that system and search for a new one.
The process of leaving your current CRM is going to be hard. It’s extremely difficult to convince an organization to make a change. You are working with people who will have to change technology and processes in their jobs. It will be uncomfortable. You may have a fear that this puts your job on the line as you try to transform an entire organization through this one project. You’ll have to have resilience, flexibility, and strong leadership.
But despite all of the fear and difficulty, it’s worth it. It will be the best project you’ve done in your career. You’ll look back and be proud of your leadership and the team and organization you led through enormous change. You’ll be proud of the processes you put in place and the way you were able to level up operations that couldn’t have happened without the change. You’ll be proud of the cost savings you provided to the organization by eliminating unnecessary work and the increase in fundraising from the new tools. You’ll be proud of how you left that organization better than how you found it, equipped with tools to thrive in the future.
It will 100% be worth the pain for the result.
This new system will allow you to do things you never even imagined. It will fix your pain points, such as multiple systems that don’t talk to each other, have no product innovation, and cannot customize or personalize the system to the organization’s needs. But it will also allow you to clean up your data and streamline it so the teams can rely on it and not have thousands of duplicates. It will enable you to eliminate unnecessary administrative manual tasks that staff spends time doing. It will allow you to automate communications with your donors that are so personalized they wouldn’t even know it was automated. It will allow the team to dream and build internal tools that integrate with the system and make life so much easier for staff. It will allow you to see real-time accurate data that you can use to make strategic decisions.
I’m not overstating it when I say it will change your entire job and how you fundraise.
The piece of advice I would give you is, don’t wait, make the change now.
P.S. If you’re ready to switch but don’t know how to sell it internally, check out this blog for some tips!
