I regularly help Not for Profit clients choose a new CRM for their organisation. And too often, I find the greatest CRM can still fail to meet their needs.
When I start these projects, I expect to find a legacy system with significant deficiencies. This will provide a clear business case for change. Some of these deficiencies include:
- The vendor will no longer support the existing version they have, resulting in business continuity and cybersecurity risks;
- They chose the legacy vendor based largely on budget and not their business requirements;
- The vendor is not investing adequately in its roadmap, and now it’s becoming obsolete; or
- The organisation’s needs have changed significantly since they first bought the legacy CRM.
While any of these reasons could prompt a change in CRMs, I’ve also worked with organisations that have invested in one of the best and most advanced solutions on the market, and they also don’t meet their needs.
Why?
In these cases, it’s not a vendor or technical issue. Instead, it usually has to do with other elements within the organisation, like governance. The most common ones I see are these:
- No one owns the system. The IT department will inadvertently become the system owner when it belongs in the business areas. As such, changes are made in a siloed and often ad hoc way that can impact other areas unintentionally.
- The system design isn’t documented. Whether it’s with in-house resources or external service providers, failure to document changes to the system will eventually result in chaos – kind of like a city without a city planner.
- Staff have not been trained on the system. As such, they do not understand the full capabilities of the system. This also results in bad habits passed from one employee to another and sometimes odd processes and workarounds outside of the CRM when not necessary.
For these types of clients, I can help them invest in a new CRM if that’s what they want. However, unless these other issues are addressed too, they will have the same types of problems in just a matter of time.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions, especially around investments.
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