Don't get us wrong — we love the spreadsheet.
It's an invaluable tool for organizing our thoughts, planning our next move, getting a better grasp of our data, or playing games (yes, we're serious). But if you're using spreadsheets to manage and store your funder or donor lists, there is a better way.
A CRM — or customer (or constituent) relationship management platform — is a purpose-built tool to help you manage your lists of contacts and keep track of how you engage with them.
In the business world, they're often used for sales and marketing purposes. For example, a sales team will use one to track sales calls and emails with a prospect and to determine where a contact is along the sales journey. In the nonprofit sector, organizations use them to manage their lists of funders, donors, volunteers, patrons, and so on, and to track how those individuals or groups engage with the organization.
Although CRMs are often offered as a standalone tool, email marketing solutions also typically have some sort of CRM-like capabilities built in. For example, Constant Contact, available to nonprofits through TechSoup, allows you to build lists of different segments of your audience. That way, you can readily send them tailored email messages.
Some CRMs are even designed explicitly for use by nonprofits, with features specific to their needs. TechSoup offers a number of CRM options for nonprofits.
Although it can take a little getting used to, a CRM system offers a number of benefits over spreadsheet-based donor lists.
A CRM gives you tight control over who can access your funder and donor data. You can grant and revoke access to your CRM database easily, and many systems let you set varying levels of access, depending on the kinds of data your staff or volunteers need to get to. And in many cases, you can require additional security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, to reduce the risk of a data breach.
A CRM makes it easy to slice and dice your lists depending on various criteria. For instance, you can create a list of small-dollar donors and another of large funders and tailor your outreach to each group. Unlike spreadsheets, you don't have to copy your data from one file to another. It all pulls from a single data source, which helps you keep your contact lists current and reduces the chances of duplicate entries.
When you work with spreadsheets, you run the risk of having multiple versions of the same list, each with different versions of your data. For example, you may have one version with a new set of contacts that another copy of the spreadsheet lacks. Another version may have a critical piece of data that you need right now, but it's sitting on someone else's computer.
This isn't a problem with a CRM. Since all your data is in one place, it can all stay in sync. Plus, using a CRM forces you to look at the big picture when it comes to your data — what data you have, how it's organized and managed, the language you use to describe it, and so on.
Let's get this out of the way — it's always possible to accidentally delete important data from a CRM. But since CRM databases are stored on cloud services with lots of redundancy, the risk of data loss due to data corruption or hardware failures is quite low. From crashes to accidental deletions, it's much easier to lose data with a spreadsheet-based system.
Quick — when did you last call your 10 biggest donors? What did you say in your last email with them? What is their giving history? These are all the sorts of things that a CRM can track and readily surface but may get lost in a collection of spreadsheets. When you have easy access to this sort of information, you can learn from it and make more informed decisions through the course of your fundraising efforts.
CRM systems can generally support many, many contact records. And many CRM providers offer plans for practically any size organization and any size of contact database, from a few hundred contacts to a few million.
We've partnered with Tech Impact to offer the Donor and Customer Relationship Management Platform Selection Assistant. With this service, an expert will meet with you and help you determine the best CRM options for your needs. It's a great way to begin your journey toward a more powerful — and more effective — means of managing your donor data.
[Thumbnail photo: Shutterstock]