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?

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!

 

One size doesn’t fit all, but for too long nonprofits of all sizes have either had to settle for stripped-down fundraising CRM systems with limited functionality (and let’s face it, less than appealing user interfaces) or be roped into expensive, complex systems that were unwieldy to administer for smaller scale shops. Thankfully CRM’s are more […]

For many companies, social channels have been a nice add-on to sales efforts, but having a social strategy hasn’t quite become the norm as of yet.

However, successful companies are evolving to understand how social has become a lifeline for every company!

Part of the reason is that most CRM’s are not fully integrated with social channels, so engaging with and tracking social involvement has been challenging.

But the time has come people – if your organization isn’t engaging with social, it needs to get a life.

No longer is this kind of outreach superfluous, and with firewalls shutting out more and more email every day these channels are now a vital way to reach your constituents and learn how they feel about your work, follow up a post they make in reference to your brand, or just say thanks for coming to an event.

Modern CRM systems allow you to see your social channels and related activity all in one place using its Social module so you can track activity and respond in real time across all your channels.

You can also filter what social activity you want to track within this module.

For example, perhaps you want to track all your active contacts that might be talking about your organization or all those organizations that you have submitted proposals to.

You can even create a keyword search to track all social activity related to a particular subject matter that might be relevant to your organization.

For example, your organization is supporting particular legislation and you want to see any posts that mention it.

In addition, you can post right to your social accounts and track activity right from your CRM. Integrating your accounts is a breeze.

We hope these get you excited about the brave new role of social media because one thing is for sure, it’s relevance to your organization is becoming a vital lifeline.

Here is a quick video that previews some of the potentials of social working within a CRM:

 

There are a lot of project management software solutions out there because let’s face it, we need them! But having another stand-alone tool that may or may not integrate with your other systems is fortunately fast becoming a thing of the past. For those in the nonprofit sector seeking to embrace (and demand!) a single […]

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 […]

Major healthcare and larger school systems have rallied around the concept of constituent portals for their users, but typically these have had to be built from scratch and involved significant technical know-how and expense. But as of late, there are a few forward-thinking nonprofit CRM vendors out there who have opened up the constituent portal to […]

Automation: We define automation as “the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services.”

A word that is thrown around a lot when it comes to using technology.

We would like to take the opportunity to provide a list of opportunities you immediately incorporate in your business to reap the benefits of CRM software automation in your business critical functions (and feel comfortable with).

  • Streamline communication

    • Communication with your leads, clients, customers, vendors and other segments happen without human involvement.
      • For example, does it require you or a member of your staff to remember to send recurring invoices out on a monthly basis?
      • Do subscriptions service reminders and lapsed subscriptions service reminders require a huge effort to get out of the door?
  • Consistent and predictable results

    • If reminders and communications with constituents happen accurately and consistently you can begin to develop forecasting based on the timely execution of processes and tasks.  If I know the night of the 31st, all recurring invoices and subscription reminders will go out with a link to a payment page where they can make their payment online I can forecast based on previous months of us performing this we will have an influx of revenue the first of every month.  In most cases when we perform this, we get an 18% immediate subscription payment closure rate.
  • Enforce accountability

    • If the entire organization is aware there will be weekly or monthly reporting on sales activities and they should use this to be successful at their job there should be no obstacles in their way for meeting expected goals.
  • Minimize costs, positive impact on staff morale and reduction in manual errors

    • If leadership or other internal staff members or volunteers are performing routine tasks in the areas of data entry, entering contact reports, tracking phone calls, updating event attendance, etc these are tasks that can be automated.  Which will provide a higher level of accuracy and increase the morale of internal staff members.

Grants and major gifts have often been a stepchild consideration in CRM module design and functionality, even though this data is vital in capturing and informing almost every nonprofit’s financial performance and strategy. This limitation has lead many a nonprofit to have to create independent reporting for grants and major gifts, often generated from spreadsheets […]

I wanted to highlight the power of being able to share a calendar as one example of how communication across your sales organization can be enhanced.