Your 5-Step Guide to an eCRM System Selection
Introduction
Your organization’s donor software is more than just a way to organize contact records and receipts for your organization. In this age of data-driven fundraising, the right digital fundraising system can be transformative. Your eCRM is the centerpiece of your technology stack, and it impacts every aspect of your donor strategy and internal processes, not to mention your bottom line.
5 Steps for Success
Purchasing a new digital fundraising system is a big investment, so it’s important to plan your selection carefully. These common steps will help you avoid pitfalls and will set you up for a successful system selection.
1. Assess Your Current State
What are your main reasons for seeking a new system? What areas are in your evaluation?
To envision your ideal technology state and long-term goals, it’s helpful to first analyze your current system landscape. Performing a technology assessment of your current ecosystem will help you identify successes, pain points, and gaps in your current systems. This step involves an analysis of your current fundraising system plus other individual software solutions your organization uses. This includes your CMS, fundraising solutions, project management tools, and other platforms your team uses to be successful.
Before you begin, it is important to establish your evaluation tools:
Create a place to record platform metrics.
Establish areas of interest and specific criteria. We recommend breaking down the entire system into areas (add why). This helps you thoroughly think through each section and creates a structure that you can grade each platform option on. We typically include user interface, customer support, vendor reliability, security, and most importantly, each functional area of the platform you’re evaluating.
Create a place to document detailed requirements and ratings by stakeholder groups. Your requirements will clearly outline your needs and will lay the foundation for the system selection. You’ll use it to understand how your users interact with the system and what functionality they need to do their job successfully. The requirements document will be a core element throughout the selection process to ensure that the new system meets each of your team’s unique needs.
Write down key metrics from your current eCRM, including the number of constituent records you have, how many users are in the system, hosting and security details, and costs.
Take inventory of your software systems. As you take note of each system in use, document its purpose, what problem it solves, and what overall goals it achieves. This will help you define the usefulness of each of your software platforms.
Gain insights through user interviews. This is a great opportunity to interview the “power users” of each tool across multiple teams to gain a better understanding of how they use the software. Learn what they find helpful about the software, workarounds they use regularly, and features they wish the platform had. Encourage creative thinking, and document the needs, must-haves, and nice-to-haves.
Take a deep dive into integration capabilities. Getting your systems to pass data back and forth is an important and often complicated part of your technology ecosystem, and it’s great to get ahead of this at the beginning of the project. So, although you haven’t chosen your new eCRM, and it is possible that some of your platforms may be replaced by your new online fundraising platform, knowing its integration capabilities upfront will provide you with the information you need to make that decision later. It could even influence your decision.
Most importantly, document the use cases, requirements, and wish list items from your system assessments in your evaluation tool. Then, add a priority score to each feature to help you grade potential platforms against these requirements.
2. Organize Your Project Team & Tools
Choosing a new eCRM will have a lasting impact on your organization for years to come. It is critical that you establish a project team with strong leadership and involve stakeholders who are best-suited to evaluate the solutions. This point in the journey is when you should strongly consider hiring a consulting firm that has ample experience in facilitating the process. They can help guide your team through the steps, quell nervousness, and provide an objective perspective.
Assign an internal project leader. This person will own the timeline, budget, and communications plan.
Get organization-wide buy-in and stoke excitement for the future. You’ve got the backing of leadership, but your team of end-users is where things get real. A significant goal of transitioning to a new eCRM is to make it easier for your team members to do their jobs, so changing systems will have a significant impact on your team’s day-to-day tasks. Additionally, they will be asked to continue their jobs and take on this new project while embracing a big change. In general, change is hard for most people to accept. And all new software has a learning curve, so there’s a short-term slowdown in productivity and usually a bit of frustration. The next few tactics will help minimize change avoidance and maximize project satisfaction amongst your team.
Create a communications plan that keeps staff updated on the project progress. This is important to ensure that your team is not left in the dark and that they know what to expect (and what is expected of them) during and after the selection process.
Start preparing your change management plan. Ask staff about their learning styles. Do they want to access an online library for training and support, or will they prefer to pick up the phone and talk to someone? Knowing this early will help you select a system that offers the options you need. Remember that different departments might use the technology slightly differently, so explore ideas for large training courses or smaller “train the trainer” sessions. Remember, your organization is unique and this is not a one size fits all approach.
Open a line of communications for complaints. Make it easy for staff to submit issues and frustrations. Being willing to listen is half the battle.
Build morale by branding the project with a name. Consider adding some fun into the selection process. Whether you provide t-shirts for all stakeholders, or plan a party, some festivity will build contagious enthusiasm.
Identify Key Decision-Makers and form your leadership committee. Determine which individuals are crucial in the decision-making process to ensure that all necessary stakeholders are involved at the outset. Input from those who will use the fundraising system regularly is vital. When creating your team, make sure to weigh the influence of those who represent your donor stewardship and fundraising goals over administrative teams like finance and IT. While all voices are important, administrative challenges can be solved while donor connection is the primary goal.
Define your evaluation tools. Decide on your method to record your findings and evaluate the platforms options.
Determine your budget. Now that you have a better idea of your team’s needs, you should determine your budget for the new eCRM.
3. Research the marketplace to get a broad view of options.
Now that you’re clear on the value of a powerful nonprofit eCRM and who should be part of the decision, it’s time to talk about how to navigate the evaluation process.
Finding the right digital fundraising system for your Organization will not be a simple Google search. Reach out to your network of peers and vendors to help identify a list of platforms that meet your high-level requirements. Ask other local nonprofits or trusted people in your nonprofit’s field what they use.
Once you have a list of nonprofit eCRMs, prepare your vendor questionnaire for evaluating inclusion in your short list. This is where that evaluation matrix you created comes in handy. Providing a detailed questionnaire for a vendor to respond to a feature list with out of box, customization or does not support, will begin your process of narrowing down your choices. The questionnaire should also include platform related questions like pricing models, hosting, security and total cost of ownership overtime. Make sure you evaluate the often-overlooked costs like, data migration, Hardware & IT, ongoing training, maintenance and upgrades.
4. Schedule Scripted Demos
With your short list, schedule scripted demos with the vendor. Be sure to have them demonstrate specific functionality detailed in your requirement matrix. Stakeholders will then be asked to score the response to their priority items. This level of direction and documentation will help you avoid a sales presentation that skirts over your most needed features and will back up your future system selection decision.
5. Make your decision.
After all of the hard work and due diligence during the selection process, making the decision should be the easy part. The most important thing is to consider longevity over quick fixes or “the easy choice.” Your eCRM system will act as the foundation of your fundraising efforts and will benefit you for many years to come.