If there is one differentiator that highlights the difference between CRM’s designed for nonprofits and all others it is gift entry. This has been one of the main reasons nonprofits have been so limited in their choices for a CRM solution, with only a few large players offering the necessary functionality to handle donations and serve as a complete fundraising CRM software solution.

The downside is that for the most part, these CRM products either lack true integrations with other apps and software your organization is likely using or lack an accompanying one source solution suite that meets all your business-critical processes and workflows.

For example, if you want to generate gift acknowledgment letters in your CRM so you can automate this task you might want to access letters stored in Google Drive or Microsoft Office that your staff is already collaboratively using. Rather than having to jump between platforms to update and access these letters your CRM should connect with the product and allow for seamless updates to happen in both places.

Either that or your CRM should have an internal product solution that then handles word processing functions from within CRM. Or as another example, let’s say you are sending an email gift acknowledgment directly from your CRM.

Doesn’t it make sense to have all of your other constituent email communication tracked in the same place?

In this way, the history of donor communication is all right there on the individual record, either through built-in CRM email functionality or by integrating with another solution that shares email across platforms (Outlook, Gmail, etc). In either case, you are then able to see acknowledgment emails right next to campaign emails, as well as all other email outreach to a particular constituent giving you the entire donor communication picture just by looking within the contact record.

While CRM’s that are not built specifically for nonprofits might offer better integration with other products and solutions and more overall functionality (and just flat out might be a better product) they are largely out of the field of consideration because they fail to understand how foundational gift entry options like soft credits and matching gifts are to organizations.  And since these entries are often cross-referenced throughout a system it is difficult if not impossible to customize a CRM to meet those needs. For example, let’s say you enter a major donor gift for a constituent.

That gift doesn’t just need to be added to the contact record, it needs to link to campaigns, funds, and appeals, as well as to other accounts or proposals as appropriate.

This is the only way to fully track and report on fundraising performance and support cultivation of donors across your CRM.

In addition, because nonprofits need their CRMs to handle things like installments and pledge activity as well as assigning soft credits to other donor records and accounts, there is yet again another wall in the way for those forward-thinking nonprofits looking for more choice and the enhanced product integration that might be offered by other CRM solutions.  And for those organizations that offer memberships, gift entry is even more nuanced and interconnected, which has made managing memberships its own specific software niche with solutions designed solely to handle that functionality. For many nonprofits, however, membership is just one of many fundraising streams, and ideally, this activity should be able to be tracked in the same solution that houses all of an organization’s other gift and relationship data (and it shouldn’t be an additional, stand-alone cost). While some CRM’s say they have the capacity to handle memberships as part of their larger CRM solution, often what you really get is a limited add-on that ends up not being able to offer a way to automate the membership journey which just ends up creating a high volume of manual updating.

Why is all of this important? Well, if more CRM designers recognized and built their CRMs with the industry-specific needs of nonprofits in mind (like gift entry) there might emerge more challengers to what has largely been a closed market – and in a time when nonprofits can no longer compromise on having either true integration or a one source solution suite – that might be good for us all.

For more information on how Nonprofit Vertical Source CRM can help your organization realize its mission click here.