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.