Having worked for a few nonprofits in my time, I have seen first hand how lack of training stimies the power of technology in your operations schema, particularly as it relates to your nonprofit CRM software. It’s hard enough to do the product and pricing research as well as engage with your team/s to identify what technology tools would best serve your nonprofit. At which point training seems like just one more thing to consider and to easily take a pass on. The process of acquiring new technology, in fact, is a little like a home improvement project. You start out wanting to replace a light switch and end up rewiring your whole house. This is often why decisions about technology are some of the most tabled and deferred among nonprofits. Of course, I’m a strong advocate of biting the bullet, doing the research, asking the questions, and making the case to the powers that be because as anyone knows who’s read this blog before I have a strong opinion about adopting the technology your nonprofit needs because technology empowers mission.
So let’s assume for the moment that you have found your tool/tools. It’s likely that it’s taken everything you have to make the case for the base product costs, and it is equally likely that when you asked the vendor about training costs you were met with two options. One, you can go it alone and have access to their Knowledgebase articles or two, you can buy a very expensive training package. When you take this information to your decision makers, they will wave off the need for training, usually by suggesting that one person can “just learn it,” and then train others. They will feel great about saving a large cost, but the view is short-sighted. Granted, if we are talking about a simple add-on tool, learning it and showing your team might be just fine. But if you are working to create integrated technology workflows that truly support your overall operations I invite you to bring on the training! Here’s why. If you have chosen the right tools, everyone should be interfacing with them; this is particularly true of CRM’s. Gone are the days when a database administrator is the only one accessing the system, and yay for us because it creates a totally new opportunity for your internal team to be engaged on the same page with shared information and workflows that facilitate community and cross over among all the departments and facets of your organization.
The beauty of how CRMs, in particular, have evolved is that they are now hubs for all your organizational workflows and communication – internal and external. So everyone needs to know how to access the calendar feature and post activities. Everyone needs to know how to email, call, engage with social, run reports, etc specific to their area from within CRM. If you are talking about project management software – everyone needs to know how to access and work within projects. Most project management and CRM software are horribly underutilized, and the number one reason is that people don’t know how to use the functionality. Granted, it used to be stupidly technical to do some of these things back in the day (like pull reports, set up mail merges…groan). But now, you can send out a group email thanking people for participating in an event or updating them on a program change in seconds, and anyone can do it, once they have been trained.
Are you a program manager starting a new program? No one knows better than you what information you would like tracked, so you should be able to design your own module within CRM to do just that, but someone does have to show you how the first time. Or maybe your team is assigned different prospective donors to cultivate. Every interaction you have, from phone calls to email campaigns, should be done from within your CRM by any person on your team, and it easily can be, once they know how. It shouldn’t take a communications specialist to complete these tasks. Or let’s say your event staff wants to post their event on your website and have people sign up to register. They should be trained on how to create a simple webform on the site and link it to your other technology tools so that things like registrations are flowing right into your CRM. Technology is easier to use than ever if you are trained, and at this point, you can do almost everything without knowing HTML – it’s just simple cut and paste. The key is knowing how the information flows together, and how to use the tools that allow it to do so, and that takes, yes, training.
With everyone sharing the knowledge of how to use your technology tools, your whole community is connected and has access to the same information and functionality. This kind of transparency and flow will have a major impact on your overall operations. To revisit the cost issue for a moment, here’s the thing. We’ve been thinking about this internally as we start to launch Nonprofit Vertical Source. We recognize that SaaS is “Software as a Solution” not “Software as a Service,” and so we feel like the major players in the technology market are making money off the fact that their tools are difficult to use and lack integration. This is why so much training is required to use them. So we wanted to think of a new way to approach training, and when we looked at how people were interfacing with our product, we really came to understand that first, technology, even something as powerful as a CRM, should not be hard to use. Our approach has been to create short introductory training videos in addition to KB articles so you can quickly learn how to do something by watching someone do it. We like to incorporate this as part of the migration and implementation process. We believe our clients benefit the most from a hybrid process in which we help them learn the tools they are working with as we help them move their data into and among those tools. Support and training options should also be available on demand and have mobile access so you can find out how to do something anytime, anywhere. What you should not have to do is sit in a training class that offers a linear, standard approach that seems to show you all the things you could have figured out on your own, and none of the organization or team-specific things your team really needs to know to maximize their technology ROI.
Keep in mind also that when you are looking for technology tools and asking about the implementation process be sure to note how long the vendor says it will take for implementation and what their approach is. When new CRM adoptions fail it is usually because the products are too technical to implement and staff does not get trained along the way, so ask specific questions about implementation expectations up front.
Once you pick the right tools, from fundraising to program management, for integrated success, complete the process with an investment in training that will pay you back in spaids on the operations front. Allocate the resources (and yes, that means time and money) to train your people to use them. And if you are concerned about the costs, write a grant to cover your journey. More and more community foundations and other giving entities are aware that these investments pay huge dividends and are happy to fund such projects. And also, think about what it’s costing you to be underutilizing the right tools. Every aspect of your mission benefits from staff that is connected and empowered to use their technology to the fullest in the service of mission. Power to the user!
