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 […]
Moves Management is not something that Development makes a priority or work on. Moves Management is an organization-wide initiative that everyone in the organization has to embrace and understand.
Being able to determine how your sales pipeline is performing throughout the year can be challenging to understand without clear and simple reporting.
We would like to encourage you to PAUSE for a moment and develop a visual representation of your sales pipeline.
Your pipeline should not only be for the fiscal year but break that bad boy down into quarters or months.
Proactive Sales
Approaching sales with a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach is where you can use technology.
Integrating technology into your sales process enables you to make real-time adjustments to your sales strategy.
In a favorite CRM software of our is Zoho CRM; where included in the CRM is a module called Forecasts that provides the entire organization performance reporting by individual solicitors and organizational role.
With the selection of the year and quarter (or monthly) you can understand the current deals in the sales pipeline and if they have been funded or the percentage of likelihood that they will be.
This type of reporting allows the entire organization to understand the current status of revenue.
Empowering sales professionals to know not only the current progress to goals but to understand where they need to focus attention and resources to close deals successfully.
Everyone runs their companies technology based on the unique business needs of the company and strategy. We wanted to offer a few suggestions on common pain points that all CRM Management professionals can use.
Listed below you will find a few tips and trick to support keep these areas maintained.
Modern CRM Design
Now that CRM’s are designed with whole organizational teams accessing the system in mind, the whole process of thinking of the desired list, submitting a request to the database administrator and waiting for that person to go through the often cumbersome process of setting up a query and then exporting that data into a usable report.
Using List Views
Sometimes a change in verbiage reflects a larger shift in functionality and this has certainly been the case in CRM’s now referring to queries as views.
I’ll review how you can look at CRM software views as a tool to support productivity with your salesforce processes.
Even if you try on the two words, you immediately sense the difference.
Queries sound scientific and serious, while views sound expansive and inviting.
It’s a shift from having to mine to extract hard to get at information to simply open the shutters to reveal what is already there in all its potential.
As designers have simplified CRM user interfaces across the board, one of the biggest changes has been the recognition that it shouldn’t take a special skill set to see data organized into subsets and lists.
Thankfully all of the cumbersome steps required in the past are no more!
They have been replaced by simple filters that can yield specific results in seconds within the same window the user is currently accessing.
These list views can then be acted upon immediately, such as sending out a mass email to a particular group, or they can be used to generate reports that can then be automatically updated.
List views can also be saved locally so users can simply click on a drop-down menu to bring up a specific filtered group.
Views are unique to each user, you can keep what is relevant for you in your particular role without cluttering up the system with a mass of views.
In addition, you can switch views between tasks so that you don’t have to pull up a report and consider it alongside what you are trying to do, the view that is most relevant to your task is simply what you choose, see, and work within.
When you are done with the task you just simply revert to the regular view.
All this leads to much more efficiency in executing tasks, running reports, sending email and social campaigns, and organizing your activities.
Want to see a list of all the leads you have not contacted in the last quarter so you can send them a quick email?
Wondering how many proposals are in the closed/won stage so you can use that information for a budget update? Just use views to give you those lists with ease.
Even the actual search criteria options have become both more refined and more broadly responsive to how different users might think to search.
For instance, you could look up all the records that “contain” a particular word within a particular field to generate a list.
The sophistication of queries remains, but with a far more intuitive process.
Queries were one of the great hindering factors in the democratization of the CRM for nontechnical users, isolating a seemingly inaccessible mountain of data and allowing only the most technical of climbers access.
The shift toward powerfully intuitive list views should not be underestimated.
One is that your whole business becomes more open, efficient, and connected because more people are actually using your CRM.
The other is that everyone is then using data to drive the key decisions and actions that empower your sales team and business goals, and that is where the real gain lies.
CRM software makes another leap – enjoy the view!
System And Record Coding (Don’t Over Do It)
As we’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years one of the first things I do is take a look at their code tables.
This truly lets me know where the business is and how organized their data is.
Trying to convince yourself that “your business is SPECIAL.” Like my second in command in my last job used to tell me
“It’s Not Always About You.”
I would love to have a conversation with anyone in business about how much of their work isn’t even supporting their sales and customer journey.
Look at your coding and how you look at the tasks your company is executing.
In some cases, companies have finally let go of work and tasks they have been performing for a year when we put their work under this kind of lens.
If you want to truly measure what your business is doing, you should be asking yourself with each activity you perform in your business “is it in related to”:
Is this one of the listed below:
- Identification
- Cultivation
- Solicitation
- Stewardship?
Managing And Tracking Data And Report Requests In Your CRM
I recently had the opportunity to stop in on a Facebook Page for CRM users and a new CRM system manager was discussing how she had an immediate report request from her boss and needed a little help.
Well after I provided the answer another user jumped on and discussed how she was making the industry more difficult for other because she did not force the person making the reporting request wait 7 days to deliver it.
I totally understand this person point of view and for a time I believed it myself.
However, as you begin to understand that the world and business do not work that way!
Business and opportunities present themselves at any time and it doesn’t come down to the need to provide structure and time for how you work.
Your right, database managers are very busy and are the superman/women for the office.
There are steps we can take to make handling the normal pace of chaos in our roles with a few proactive approaches that we cover in the video in this blog post.
A true professional in this field takes full responsibility for their role in the company, though most of the time our role is a thankless role we have to think long-term and strategically to support the needs of all areas of the business.
If you’ve been a CRM system manager at any time, you’ve experienced the situation where just a few months earlier you ask leadership if certain data points should be captured and they say “NO”.
Just to come back later and explain they need reporting on that data they asked you not to collect?
Staying organized and not letting data and reporting request slip through the crack has to be a priority when providing information for the company.
Make sure you have a logical systematic process in place for managing those requests to keep the flow of information going.
View the video below to walk through managing data requests in your CRM and how it can make the entire business more productive.
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.
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!
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 […]
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 […]
If you’re an organization that has taken the opportunity to invest in a prospect screening of a group of constituents or screened your entire database then I’m sure you have taken into consideration the value of the prospects home when determining the potential capacity of a major gift.