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The Death of Data Entry: How Your CRM Should be Entering its Own Data

Heretofore data entry has been a necessary evil of the having a CRM; it’s also one of the major reasons most of your staff aren’t using the most powerful tool in your fundraising and operations arsenal. So for mission’s sake, the death of data entry can’t come too soon.

Let’s take a quick example of data entry’s cumbersome nature by looking at how your development staff might be experiencing it. Let’s say you (reasonably) ask that each team member log notes in CRM after each meeting or phone call with a donor. What you might hear in response is that the follow up took as much or more effort than the engagement itself.

Yet this information is invaluable so that when anyone looks up the donor record, whether it is program staff responding to an inquiry or event staff looking for possible entry points for developing a sponsorship relationship they all have a history and context for the next engagement. This keeps their conversations relevant and on point.

This kind of context is also imperative to maintain consistency in engagement whenever there is staff turnover.

Logging volunteer and program information often present a similar level of manual labor woes. Staff is tasked with entering hours spent on particular projects, information from volunteer applications or vital program stats such as attendance and demographic information.

This kind of quantitative data is vital for donor and grant reporting, as well program development and volunteer management, but it often goes underreported since entering the data into CRM generally takes a back seat to program delivery.

Email is yet another key receptacle for gathering valuable program, donor, volunteer and constituent information, but most will tell you this is where you can find the biggest holes in a conversation timeline or data bucket, with different staff reaching out or responding from different areas within an organization at different times for different reasons.

This can leave your team searching through both their organizational emails and their CRM to retrieve information and can make for missed opportunities or gaps in reporting and history vital to nurturing relationships and programs.

Rather than expecting staff to data enter all these email interactions into a constituent’s record, most CRM’s now offer integrated email so that every email flows out of CRM and every response flows right back in so you can see who has engaged and what those conversations were about in one place. This doesn’t necessarily mean your CRM has to have built-in email functionality, but it should certainly allow you to integrate with products like Gmail and Outlook that your organization might already be using.

The bottom line is that it is mission critical to have your CRM doing the data entry by capturing phone calls, emails, and other communication lines such as social all within that constituent’s or program’s record.

The same goes for capturing campaign and donation information. If you are still sending out direct mail campaigns, those generally need to be manually created in CRM as campaigns, and when the donations start coming in, those too will need to be manually tagged or otherwise coded to reflect that they are in response to a particular campaign. While there are bulk data entry options in most CRM’s, any database administrator or accounting staff person will tell you it is still time-consuming to make sure everything is entered correctly.

The same goes for email campaigns. Your nonprofit CRM software should either allow you to send out email campaigns as part of its email marketing functionality or allow you to integrate with products like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact.

But even if you have those products integrated with your CRM, the incoming donations are likely still coming in without you knowing exactly what campaign they are in response to leading to more research and data entry, and coordinated efforts between your accounting department and CRM.

With the coming of single source product suites, however, your channels should be integrated into CRM and enjoy the kind of direct communication lines that effectively eliminate this kind of data entry. Let’s revisit email campaigns to give you an idea of what this kind of direct line communication is like.

First of all, your CRM really should have internal email marketing functionality or an integration as mentioned above. This allows you to put a giving button directly into the email that can link donors to a landing page specific to the campaign where they enter their donation information.

It can look exactly like your regular website donation page, but with a campaign specific field or fields (hidden to the viewer) that not only bring that donation transaction information into CRM automatically but also ensures it is coded correctly to associate it with the particular campaign.

From here you can then set up a simple, personalized auto-response thank you and follow up series of emails with campaign updates. This eliminates the need for mail merged thank you letters that are a pain to set up or a generic email thank you that doesn’t further engage the donor.

For example, perhaps you want to automatically send out campaign updates to all donors who have given with the latest dashboard showing how their donation is being put to use (a key in establishing trust and a foundation for that all important change in status from one time, to a regular donor.) Because you have been capturing data throughout the campaign automatically in CRM, those dashboards are easy to create without any data entry and can then automatically update and be shared in email or website updates set up to be sent out automatically from within CRM. This eliminates having to export any data and then manually create monthly reports or send out separate emails everytime you want to send an update.

Or perhaps you want particular development team members notified if someone in their portfolio responds to a campaign so they can make a phone call thanking them. You don’t have to manually pull a report weekly and send to team members, you can just set up a quick automation that sends a task alert to associated team members when a gift comes in so they can then follow up. That follow up, by the way, will have much higher rates of follow-through when staff isn’t having to separately enter the notes and data from the follow-up call.

Let’s remember, the middle letter of CRM is “Relationship,” and every interaction your staff has with your CRM should be about supporting the development of those relationships, not entering data. If the data is already there you create a positive user experience for staff, one in which they feel supported, not taxed by their technology tools. Their CRM experience moves from being one where things are asked of them to one where information is given to them to help them do their jobs, and that means more of your mission realized.

These are just a few examples of how we are moving toward a data entry free experience, and there are many more, including how constituency portals and webforms can take care of data entry for you – see links here for more on those opportunities. And on a final note lets also keep in mind that with more data automatically flowing into your system, your ability to generate high-quality reporting and analytics is augmented. While this is fodder for another post, suffice to say for now that this increase in quality data better informs your key organizational decisions and moves your organization into a place of nimble, real-time proactive adjustments, rather than reactive, after the fact responses. More on that later, but for now let me be the first to say farewell to data entry – RIP.

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Business CRM Software: Why Your Company is Due for a Technology Audit

The pace of technology is moving so fast and evolving in such radical ways that it might be time for your perhaps here-to-fore practice of adopting technology solutions, including your CRM, on the go to yield to a more thoughtful organizational pause for a full technology audit.

I know, the term sounds terrible and conjures images of official looking suits marching through the door and requiring their own conference room for two months only to tell you that everything you are doing is wrong.

But fear not, despite the foreboding term, the technology audit can be both informal and efficient and can offer your organization vast rewards in both productivity and cost savings as well as overall operational performance.

Traditionally, IT has been its own department and as long as the organization’s technology tools were in place and functioning, IT and senior management mainly existed in separate spheres.

As it specifically related to CRM management, there was usually a database manager or other designated IT staff that handled all the inflows, outflows, and basic troubleshooting as the gatekeeper to the CRM, and lived a bit in their own dominion.

But as the momentous increase in communication channels has evolved not only are more and more staff accessing their CRMs to manage donors and constituents, but CRM’s are housing more of the tools, functions, and integration potentials that allow organizations to keep all their communications and information organized under one roof.

This is starting to provide an alternative to the often reactive one-off product adoption that has been costly and fragmenting to many organizations just struggling to keep pace with what it actually takes to communicate across the many channels necessary to reach their entire audience be it donors, volunteers, clients, or internal staff.

A technology audit invites your organization to take a minute to bring IT staff and the executive team into the same room for a conversation about how technology can and increasingly must serve as the engine for your communications, fundraising, and operations.

CRM’s are no longer data storage libraries limited to primarily recording gift transactions, they are fast becoming dynamic, user-friendly platforms that power your outreach in everything from email and social campaigns to event planning and reporting, to project and program management; and they are the best tool for managing all of the related workflows.

Companies are increasingly finding that unless you have the right CRM as your communications hub, one that can integrate and house business critical functions all in one place, it is next to impossible to get your arms around running all your operations within the complex web of interaction necessary to sustain fundraising and communications in the current era.

So one critical piece to the technology audit is to assess whether your current CRM is equipped to take on the role of mission control and reign in the often unwieldy number of one-off apps and other business solutions that are currently keeping your ship running.

Audits often start out with an inventory and mapping of your organizational workflows to vet where your current technology solutions are meeting or not meeting the needs and goals of the organization across departments.

This information can then be used to suggest immediate shifts or actions as well as being applied to one and five-year strategic plans to identify priorities, shifts, and actions that will be necessary to create a technological environment in line with larger goals and objectives.

It also reveals whether there can be more coordinated products or integrations that might consolidate solutions and enhance efficiencies while reducing overall costs.

Staff tends to have strong thoughts and opinions about technology, and the technology audit offers a productive avenue for gathering those opinions and ideas.

This feedback can also reveal where there might be holes in training or user experience that might be inhibiting even a well-executed technology plan.

It also bridges the sometimes isolated sphere of your IT staff and elevates their role to an active one in overall organizational planning which it should be.

This is because often senior management doesn’t have a complete understanding of technology and tends to either overestimate its potential (“So can’t you just push a button and all of our emails will be sent out in a coordinated fashion for the year?”) or they underestimate it and are unaware of areas where it is being underutilized and efficiency gains or tools missed (“Um, actually yes, we can automate our entire membership life cycle.”)

 

 

Questions that usually get tabled like, “Should we integrate our accounting software with CRM?” or “Should we invest in more licenses for users in the CRM so more staff can share coordinated workflows?” also have a forum within the context of a technology audit.

This forum allows enough conversation and assessment to coalesce in order to thoughtfully inform these more significant decisions.

These can then either be acted upon with a timeline and action plan for implementation or more thoughtfully put on hold, but at least for reasons clear to all.

So why suggest that now might be prime time for your company to consider a technology audit?

Well, one reason is that you likely needed a small nudge since it is an often overlooked activity at any time.

Another is that because there are so many new options in integration and product consolidation at this current point the time has never been better to coordinate and simplify your solutions.

A third, and perhaps most significant reason is that there has never been a time when having the right technology tools and plan, poised to meet current and future needs, has been more mission-critical to companies as the communications and fundraising landscape grows ever more sophisticated.

Determining which products that you are currently using will have the ability to scale, integrate, and keep pace with this landscape and how your staff uses them will be among the most important infrastructure decisions you will make.

Decisions that will be the key in providing optimal service to and alignment with your operational and mission objectives. So if you are feeling like you don’t have your arms around operations and technology might we suggest an audit?

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Why You Need Real-Time Data In Your CRM System and How to Get It

There’s been a lot of buzz about real-time data being one of the most valuable evolutions within the CRM software market and with good reason.

CRM’s were designed upon the premise that we could use data to drive decision making and strategy, and we have seen that bear out first with how it informed sales, and increasingly with how it can inform program and organizational direction.

My boss actually refers to our CRM as a “decision making support tool,” with the idea that any decision we make should be driven by our data, not just our gut.

I say “just,” because there will always be an important place for subjectivity and the vision of leaders that carry with them the experience of being in the field and on the personal front lines of a particular cause.

That said though, there’s nothing more elegant than when our egos can yield to include the objectivity of our data in the pursuit of realizing the most of our missions. After all, and we often forget this, data is just a way of aggregating and organizing a human response.

In this way, there is lifeblood in our analytics and having the right tools to use this powerful information to make decisions that optimize our systems will always be far from mechanistic.

What feels mechanistic to us, however, is how clunky our CRM technology has felt to use when pulling together these responses.

In the past CRM’s did not invite human interaction mainly because their very design was a bit sterile and machine-like.

As a result, they dampened the passion of users seeking to engage them as support tools to further very human pursuits.

As technology (from AI to apps) has become more user-friendly though, we are becoming more interactive than ever with our tools and design has come a long way.

We can still be left feeling disconnected and out of touch though as we gather a piece of information from one tool or other, but continue to lack a way to bring all of this information together in an integrated, real-time way, which is when information becomes it’s most valuable and gives us the most human insights.

So when we talk about real-time data, what do we mean? Let’s take an example.

Perhaps your organization has an app that tracks students who are suspended, the reasons for the suspension, and duration of absence.

No doubt knowing this information instantly is critical, but leveraging that information to make decisions depends on how integrated that app is within your larger technology landscape and that of other stakeholders.

For example, perhaps when this information is logged it sends out a notification to all teachers alerting them to the student’s change in status and asking them for follow up actions such as posting homework assignments for that student for the days missed in advance of the absence.

If your app is integrated with your CRM, you can have that incident information flow directly into your larger data pool to allow you to use reporting to track overall suspension rates week to week or year to year so you can track triggering event trends by types for example.

Perhaps you find there is an uptick in kids suspended for bullying, or perhaps more drug-related activity starts to become apparent.

This informs what interventions or changes the school might take to address suspensions overall in real-time, and if this report is automatically emailed quarterly to other community agencies it can serve to inform their perspective and potential responses.

So even in this simple example, leveraging real-time data can have both short-term and longer-term impacts within multiple areas of your organization’s sphere of influence.

We were recently working with a community foundation and had the chance to see another example of how real-time data was bringing valuable returns.

They were able not only to be on top of what their own data was telling them in real-time (thanks to their CRM and a few other well-integrated tools working together), but could compare data across their grant partners, constituents and staff, as well as across different areas of funding so that their whole community benefitted from relevant, timely reporting about what might be working or not working to achieve common goals and outcomes.

They were also able to share that data with funders as programs were being implemented allowing their stakeholders to feel connected and relevant to the work they are supporting.

This kind of active reporting encouraged continued involvement with the foundation and engaged their board members and committees in a similar way with up to date dashboards offering simple, but compelling visual presentations of current data.

Even something as a simple as a dashboard posted on your website that shows the up to the minute status of a campaign or event goal can be a significant motivator for action.

Executive teams, boards, and program directors are shifting from waiting until the budget season to look at last year’s numbers (both financial and programmatic) and coming to expect timely updates so they can make decisions and adjustments throughout the year.

Your CRM should accommodate this evolution by allowing you to set up simple automation triggers to pull and send reports or post updated dashboards on various areas of organizational activity.

For example, if it turns out a particular public health speaking engagement had low turnout for the first three times it was offered in Q1, and the feedback from event surveys suggest the need for more relevant content, or perhaps an alternative preference for program delivery medium (perhaps a webinar is easier for those with severe RA since getting to an event in person might be subject to how a participant is feeling on that particular day for example), these changes can be made as soon as the data reveals the necessary course correction.

Bottom line – if decision makers are automatically getting reports and results with real-time data, decisions can be made in a far more timely and informed fashion.

To achieve all of this, of course, you need the right tools, connected in the right ways.

Basic things like your CRM having easy to use automation and web forms that connect to your website and a survey tool that can pull data directly from or about an event or program and have it flow right into your CRM are some of the things you should consider when looking to incorporate real-time data.

Also, consider whether your financials are flowing into CRM so you can generate reports that can, for example, cross-reference program cost with program participation and send an automatic report to program directors and appropriate committee members or executive team members.

To make real-time data work for you, it has to function within an integrated experience where your CRM, website, financial software, and other mission-critical operational tools are all sharing their data.

And that experience should have flexible tools within it so you can you easily (meaning without an IT person) customize and add modules and fields to your CRM, or create a webform that captures information unique to your organization.

Of course, you should also be able to access all your tools on a mobile device so that your staff can input or pull data anywhere, anytime, and do things like engaging with someone on social as soon as a post, comment or like comes in to keep these conversations fresh, timely and authentic.

So it is good to ask whether your organization has the right technology landscape to support the valuable contributions of real-time data, and if not it’s a great guiding question to help you start to analyze what you might need or need to adjust within your technology infrastructure to make real-time data a reality.

It also means ensuring that this landscape is well-traveled among your staff, and investing the time and resources necessary to have all your staff trained on all your tools (not just having someone specialized in one or the other.)

With your tools and your people working in concert, you will start to feel how the harmony of engaged data starts to inform every decision your organization makes in support of your common vision.

So don’t let the opportunities of real-time data slip through your fingers – now is the time!

 

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