Make More of What You Already Have - Part 1: Your Nonprofit Has Data. Are You Getting Enough from It?
.png)
If you work at a nonprofit, there’s a good chance your organization has collected years of valuable information about donors, gifts, campaigns, programs and relationships.
There’s also a good chance some of that information is harder to use than it should be.
Maybe your fundraising team has to check several places to understand the history of a donor relationship. Maybe a report requires someone to pull together multiple spreadsheets. Or maybe your CRM contains the information you need, but finding it quickly enough to make a decision is another story.
We heard versions of these challenges in our conversations with nonprofit leaders at the recent Nonprofit Coalition event hosted by Pittsburgh Technology Council. Teams are working with years of valuable information, but getting a clear answer from it can still mean checking multiple systems, pulling a spreadsheet, or relying on someone who knows where to look.
Start With What Your People Need
Technology conversations can quickly become conversations about platforms, features and functionality. But those aren’t usually the things your team is thinking about when they sit down to do their work.
Your development team may want to know which donor relationships need attention. Leadership may need a clearer view of fundraising or program activity. Staff and volunteers may simply need an easier way to find accurate information without asking someone else or searching through spreadsheets.
Those day-to-day needs are a useful place to start.
Look at where people are spending extra time, where information gets difficult to follow and where staff have created their own workarounds. Those moments can tell you a lot about where your technology is helping and where it could be doing more.
Your CRM May Have More to Give
For many nonprofits, the CRM has grown alongside the organization.
New programs have been added. Fundraising practices have changed. Different people have entered information in different ways. Additional spreadsheets and tools have appeared along the way.
None of that necessarily means the CRM is the wrong system.
Sometimes it means the organization has changed while the way the system is being used hasn’t kept pace.
Taking another look at your CRM can help you understand whether the information is structured in a useful way, whether important processes still make sense and whether your team can easily get the answers it needs.
The fivestar* approach is centered on making the CRM work the way fundraising actually happens, not asking your people to change good processes simply to accommodate the technology.
Better Data Can Make Every day Work Easier
When information is scattered across systems, spreadsheets, and individual knowledge, even simple questions can take time to answer.
Bringing the right information together can make a meaningful difference.
A fundraiser preparing for a donor conversation can have better context. A program leader can spend less time tracking down information. Leadership can have more confidence in what they’re seeing in a report. And staff can spend less time maintaining workarounds that developed because the existing systems weren’t quite meeting their needs.
Making the information your organization has already collected easier to use gives your team more confidence in the decisions they make every day.
What Does That Look Like in Practice?
We recently worked with a community organization that had years of donor information in its CRM. The information was there, but the team didn’t have clear visibility into some key relationships, pledge activity and fundraising opportunities.
By connecting existing information and completing missing details, we were able to help the organization identify $8,400 in overdue pledge payments, 96 households and 58 gifts missing soft credits.
What mattered wasn’t simply finding three new numbers.
The organization had information it could use. Its team had a clearer picture of where attention was needed and a practical list of actions it could take.
That’s what useful data should do.
Keep the Mission at the Center
Nonprofits are asked to do a lot with the resources available to them. Any investment of time, attention or funding into technology needs to earn its place.
Sometimes that means a new system. Other times, it means improving the CRM you already have, connecting information that has become fragmented, creating better reporting or building a focused tool around a particular need.
There isn’t one technology roadmap that makes sense for every nonprofit.
But there is a useful question every organization can ask:
Is the technology we have making it easier for our people to do the work that matters?
If the answer is “not as much as it could,” that’s a good place to start.
At fivestar*, we help nonprofits make better use of their existing CRM, data and technology so their teams have clearer information, stronger records and less manual work. That same focus shaped the resources we shared at the Nonprofit Coalition event.
Ask more of the data you already have.
Have a CRM, data or technology challenge your team is trying to work through? Tell us what you’re working toward here, and we can explore what would be most useful for your organization.
