Non-Profits and CRM: Six Tips for Success
If you are a leader that has made the smart decision to invest in a CRM platform, congratulations! You’ve given your organization many opportunities including the potential for silo-free collaboration, a unifying system of record of all your prospects/donors, and a central platform from which to build relationships, community, and donations. To optimize the roll-out of a powerful CRM software platform like popular HubSpot for example, leadership must embrace and communicate marketing strategy to the organization with clear examples of how staff and the company will benefit from a robust CRM program. Please read on to avoid pitfalls that I’ve seen occur at the best intentioned non-profit organizations.
1. CRM is a company-wide strategy to achieve stated goals and objectives
How CRM will be used, and its desired outcomes must be communicated by senior management to staff. In small-mid size non-profits, this means directly from the president or CEO. Complete clarity from the onset as to how this new system will be utilized (with specifics!) to achieve company objectives is critical for enthusiasm and adoption.
2. CRM is not a bottom-up initiative forged over time across teams.
Save time in the long run and do the hard work of setting clear business goals and objectives before putting CRM into the hands of staff. Staff needs to understand the company-wide strategy before any formal training sessions begin. The risks of management by committee are disjointed objectives, no unifying strategy and fragmented execution.
3. “KIS,” at first
Keep It Simple when rolling-out CRM tasks in the earliest stages. Perhaps early wins are integrating social media posts with top of funnel email collection. Perhaps it’s getting demographic information added to an old database. Whatever it is, get some wins, build confidence across teams, then execute on the more ambitious company objectives that teams will already be aware of.
4. Your CRM platform’s training sessions included in your fees will be “how-to” and tactical
Trainers know their own systems. They do not know your business. You’ll learn about the tactical functionality of your new CRM platform in spades from these smart trainers. Your teams need to know what they themselves are trying to achieve through their use of CRM before training begins. Without clarity of purpose teams will be overwhelmed at best. At worst, they may view the training as a waste of time because they can’t apply it directly to their core responsibilities. As the maritime adage goes, “No wind is the right wind without a port in mind.”
5. Leadership involvement
If a president has not given ownership of CRM to a specific executive, then, the president/CEO should attend and introduce training sessions. Remind all departments of what is desired from CRM and how teams will work together to achieve those objectives. Failure to get involved can send a message of indifference that, intentionally or not, reverberates across staff and leads to a retreat towards silos. Teams benefit from big-picture vision that only a president or senior executive can provide. It’s natural for any staffer to view CRM as a tool to achieve their own KPIs. Broader perspective is needed to keep collaboration high. Of course, a senior leader of the company can’t make every session. But at bare minimum, make sure they’re on the list of meeting invitees so that management’s involvement and commitment are felt by staff.
6. Adoption cynics
Many that have operated at a non-profit for decades with some success will be reluctant to learn yet another system. As such, cynics will appear. As noted above, leadership by example is key as is introducing and consistently using CRM lexicon from “sales funnels” to “conversions.” A great article was written by ArcStone about winning over cynics at non-profits.