5 Steps Nonprofits Can Take to Put together for a CRM Migration

5 Steps Nonprofits Can Take to Put together for a CRM Migration

Your nonprofit’s CRM, or constituent relationship administration system, needs to be a central hub for storing information about and managing relationships with donors, volunteers, and different key stakeholders. CRM goes past easy information storage and evaluation by providing extra options like fundraising, occasion administration, and advertising and marketing instruments. 

In case your nonprofit faces limitations with its CRM’s capability or performance, it’s most likely time to improve to a brand new answer that may higher deal with your wants. Nonetheless, selecting emigrate—and getting ready for that important change—generally is a tough, demanding determination. 

This submit explores key components to think about when transitioning to a brand new CRM and the steps you’ll must take to arrange for the migration.

Ought to You Migrate?

As a result of migrating to a brand new CRM will be time- and resource-intensive, you’ll must fastidiously think about your choices earlier than shifting ahead. Assess whether or not it’s the suitable time emigrate by asking questions like:

• • Are our present mission-critical workflows (fundraising, donor monitoring, and many others.) clunky, or do we’d like workarounds to maintain them operating?
  • Does our CRM present visibility throughout all constituent information, or is information siloed throughout a number of platforms?
  • How well-structured is our information, and is any cleanup wanted?
  • What’s the whole price of our present answer versus the potential CRM (together with the fee emigrate, licensing, help, integrations, coaching, and many others.)?
  • Can our present answer scale with our development in donors, beneficiaries, new applications, income, and many others., or are we near hitting capability limits?
  • Can the brand new CRM help integrations with our different mission-critical instruments?

Moreover, you’ll must safe buy-in from key leaders and stakeholders earlier than migrating. When nonprofit leaders are on board with these modifications, you’ll current an enthusiastic, united entrance to workers to help the preparation course of and encourage the brand new device’s adoption.

Making ready to Migrate in 5 Steps

1. Set up a timeline.

First, decide once you’ll begin the migration course of and get a tough estimate for a way lengthy it would take. Evaluation your contracts together with your current CRM supplier, timing the migration so that you don’t should go with out a CRM or pay for 2 CRMs concurrently.

Every case is completely different, making it difficult to estimate how lengthy a migration will take precisely. For instance, a nonprofit planning to transition from NPSP to Nonprofit Cloud, each Salesforce options, might have a shorter timeline than a company migrating between two completely separate techniques. Different components that may affect your migration timeline embody:

• • Information quantity 
  • Information high quality
  • Quantity and complexity of integrations
  • Quantity and complexity of customizations 
  • Stakeholder alignment and decision-making
  • Coaching and consumer adoption

2. Consider and manage your information.

Subsequent, have a look at your information to find out whether or not it’s migration-ready. Typically, you can’t merely copy and paste your current information into the brand new CRM as a result of differentferent options construction information otherwise. As an alternative, you’ll must take this time to study concerning the new CRM’s information framework and termiology, and easy methods to translate current information into that new mannequin.

Listed here are a couple of steps that may information this course of:

• • Determine every CRM’s information constructing blocks. Decide how your present and new CRMs outline fundamental information of their fashions. For instance, how do they outline particular person items of knowledge? What concerning the containers for these particular person information factors? Figuring out these will allow you to perceive easy methods to convert current information to suit into the brand new mannequin.
  • Kind your information into classes. As an alternative of tackling your entire file directly, think about breaking it into smaller classes (e.g., donor, volunteer, constituent, and many others.) to make it extra manageable.
  • Consider information high quality. Keep away from migrating information that’s outdated, inaccurate, or has inconsistent formatting or duplicates. We’ll dig deeper into information cleanup later on this submit.

Your nonprofit must also collect and put together any data not presently saved in your CRM (e.g., advertising and marketing information siloed in an exterior advertising and marketing device). To sync and unify information, plan to combine these exterior options together with your new CRM.

3. Pinpoint particular targets and necessities.

Meet together with your leaders, workers, stakeholders, and any know-how companions aiding with the migration to debate necessities and ultimate outcomes. Brainstorm requirements versus “nice-to-haves” for the brand new CRM, utilizing this to find out whether or not you will have to implement any customizations. These would possibly embody:

• • Requirements: Centralized donor database, charitable reward monitoring, marketing campaign monitoring, superior reporting and analytics instruments, workflow automation and synthetic intelligence capabilities, and stringent safety requirements.
  • Good-to-haves: Occasion administration modules, volunteer administration options, self-service portals or instruments for donors, and devoted prospect analysis instruments.

Gathering these diversified views can assist you proactively deal with any components that would impression the implementation of the brand new answer. As an example, your fundraising workforce can assist you propose the migration across the busy year-end fundraising season to make sure you have sufficient assets throughout the course of.

4. Clear up your information.

As talked about, your nonprofit ought to comply with information hygiene finest practices earlier than migrating information to the brand new CRM. This fashion, you gained’t waste time transferring out of date or inaccurate data to your new system. Take into account the next steps:

1. 1. Conduct a complete audit. Determine all information sources, collect, and manage this data. Define what sorts of information exist (e.g., donor information and the person fields in a donor profile) and what you’ll migrate versus what you’ll delete. 
   2. Again up your data. Earlier than doing the rest, absolutely again up your total database. Doing so means you may get well your authentic information if something goes incorrect when cleansing and migrating the info.
   3. Take away duplicate and outdated entries. Delete or merge duplicate entries (e.g., your CRM has two information for a similar donor as a result of they modified their final title or up to date contact data). Take away stale information, resembling e-mail addresses that bounce, or mark the donor as inactive.
   4. Standardize formatting. Develop clear guidelines and pointers for getting into information into your new system. For instance, how ought to workers format addresses, cellphone numbers, and dates? Share these pointers together with your workforce and make sure that the usual formatting is used for any information you migrate.
   5. Validate, replace, and full contact data. Check the validity of cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses, and take away invalid ones. If wanted, use information appending companies to replace or fill in lacking data. Take into account enriching donor profiles with different helpful particulars (e.g., occupation, employer, demographics).
   6. Evaluation customized fields. Customized fields require extra consideration. Decide which fields are important emigrate and that are complicated or redundant. Archive or delete pointless fields.

It’s so necessary to plan forward as a result of, relying on the amount of your information, this course of will be time-consuming. Take into account assigning a number of hours of information cleanup to your workforce every week, coaching volunteers to help with easy guide duties, or hiring extra help.

5. Put together workers for the change.

The migration will considerably impression your workers’s day by day workflows, and it’s important to arrange them to make use of the brand new system adequately. This implies incorporating coaching, troubleshooting, and efficient change administration methods into your migration course of. 

As Fíonta’s information to CRM migration explains, change administration is “the managed, systematic means of planning and implementing modifications to technological techniques or processes.” This step is central to a clean transition and excessive adoption of the brand new system. The information additionally recommends taking the next steps:

• • Contain workers all through all the migration course of, not simply throughout coaching and documentation. Maintaining workers within the loop makes workforce members really feel heard and valued. Moreover, this permits workers to know the context behind the migration and any customized configurations.
  • Gather and implement their concepts and suggestions when attainable. Entry new views by discussing potential modifications and enhancements you may make to clean out their workflows.
  • Leverage workers champions who’re already on board with and smitten by migrating to the brand new platform. Empower them to guide by instance, promote the challenge, encourage their friends, and deal with questions and considerations. 

Go into this course of understanding that there’ll seemingly be obstacles, difficulties, and even frustration. Guarantee workers that it’s okay if there’s a studying curve, and put collectively detailed coaching supplies that deal with widespread challenges and questions. This fashion, you don’t have to begin from scratch each time you prepare a brand new workforce member to make use of the CRM.

CRM migrations are worthy investments that empower nonprofits to do extra in the long run, increasing the performance and scalability of their most necessary device. Taking these steps to arrange can stop pricey errors and setbacks, guaranteeing your migration runs easily and effectively.