Name: The CRM Decision: When to Stay, When to Switch, and How to Get It Right
Uploaded: 2025-03-11T19:30:40.356Z
Duration: 59 min 16 s
Description: The CRM Decision: When to Stay, When to Switch, and How to Get It Right

Transcript for "The CRM Decision: When to Stay, When to Switch, and How to Get It Right": We will give everyone a few minutes to join and hop on. For those who are just joining, feel free to write your name, where you're from in the chat, what organization you're from. We'd love to see if we know anyone and if there's any organized organizations we're familiar with. We also have Scott from Virtuous who will be helping manage the chat, manage any documents we're sharing and polls you'll be seeing. So we'll get to him in there. But we'll start by introducing ourselves. My name is Carly Berna. I'm the fundraiser in residence at Virtuous. I get to spend my days thinking about all things virtuous customers. I worked in the nonprofit space for ten years as the chief marketing and development officer at a $30,000,000 nonprofit. And I was was also a Virtuous customer for seven years. So I went through the CRM transition we're going to talk about today. I actually made the decision to choose Virtuous after looking at multiple different CRMs, based on our needs. And then again was a customer for seven years and now on the virtuous side get to help empower customers and, talk a lot about how fundraising is changing in the world and how responsive responsive fundraising can help that. So really happy to have our friends from Barker & Scott here today, and I'll hand it over to you all to introduce yourselves. Tell us a little bit about Barker & Scott and then jump into our content today. Thank you, Carly. Hi, everyone. I'm Jena Blaustein. I'm the director of consulting services with Barker & Scott. I've been working with nonprofits for twenty years now, mostly in the CRM space. I'm based in West Palm Beach, Florida with my husband and four kids, and I have my fifth one on the way in a couple weeks. And thrilled to be talking to you today about when to make the switch with your CRM. Great. I'm Casey Empey with Barker & Scott. So nice to meet you all. I've also been in the nonprofit space now for twenty plus years. Work sometime integral doing a lot of data analysis for nonprofits and then ran a vertical over at Blackbaud for many years and then have been doing consulting with Barker & Scott for since about 2012 and I'm really excited to dive into this topic with you all. Alright. So just to give you all some background on Barker & Scott in case you're not familiar with us, we've been around for over twenty years focusing solely in the nonprofits. We have a team of about over 40 consultants who have all served in roles all over the nonprofit from the fundraising side, the accounting side. We specialize in helping nonprofits leverage technology for their mission success. And the what makes us unique is that we do serve both the strategic side but also we're not afraid to get our hands dirty and get into the the systems and into the databases on the technical side as well. So just to give you an idea of the services that we provide, you know, high level with the strategic planning, IT roadmaps, fractional CIO services, CFO. We also do, system selections and system implementations, helping with project management, change management, help with policy and procedure documentation, training, system configuration, building out reports and workflows. Pretty much anything a nonprofit needs with the technology, we'll be happy to help you with. This is just a sampling of some of our customers that we work with. We work with small regional nonprofits as well as national and international. We focus on all the verticals. So you'll see we have arts, cultural, and humanities, education and research, conservation environment, animal welfare, health, human services, international development and relief, public society benefit, and faith based. So today, we're gonna be talking about the CRM decision, when to stay, when to switch, and how to get it right. So Casey is gonna first start us off with, some key indicators and steps to consider when you're trying to determine is it the right time to make a change or not to change. And then once you have made that decision, if you are gonna change, how to best prepare for that. And if that involves doing a selection, creating a selection plan, which would be setting you up to have a successful implementation and adoption, and then embracing that change. And we'll go through some common implementation pitfalls, and then we'll hand it back to Carly to give a sneak peek of Virtuous. So before we get started, we do have a quick poll just to gauge what CRM systems everyone is currently on. Give everyone a moment to do that. Of course, it's not letting me pull look up the polling slide. So maybe someone case of your quality could tell me if we're seeing a majority of Virtuous or Salesforce or any particular system more common? Raiser's Edge? Great. Alright. Casey, do you wanna talk through some of the key indicators and steps to consider? Yes. We'd love to do that. So, you know, when is a good time to start to consider a new CRM? There's a lot of different factors that can go into this, but some things that you might wanna think about is, if there is poor user adoption and teams are really not utilizing it, or you have a lot of workarounds that are common, or a lot of customizations on the tool to kind of meet your needs, or if the system really doesn't have a lot of great capability of integrating well or connecting with other tools that are important to you or not able to share the data that you want, in an easy way between systems to give you a good view of your, constituents. There are a lot of great within CRMs today. There's a lot of options for kind of data hygiene tools. Maybe you're using a system that isn't supporting that or isn't helping you with that or maybe you have started to outgrow your CRMs, capabilities and it's really not able to scale to your needs. Or maybe there's just, you know, rising maintenance costs, licensing and customization costs, or even cultural, costs in how you get along with your vendor. Or there's inadequate support, you know, either the support is slow, costly, or unhelpful, or you're not able to get customizations in on time. And all of this also may be impacting your constituent experience. You're not able to create the impactful experience you're looking for for your constituents. But I have to say it's not always the technology. I have to say there are so many times when Jena and I and others on the Barker & Scott team have gone in where a client has decided to do a, CRM selection, and we go and do interviews. And people say, well, this system can't do x, y, and z, and it it just stinks. I can't use it. When Jena and I are very well that that system does do, in fact, do those things. So sometimes there are things you need to think about before you just start to swap out your technology. Maybe you haven't invested the training or the other elements, you know, that are really necessary to help realize the magic of that system. Maybe you your staff is reluctant to to change their processes, and they're not really optimizing the system in the way that's necessary. They're what I would call sacred cows that you guys are you know, someone's just stuck on, and they don't wanna change their plan in order to meet the best way that the solution works. Or maybe your system is just not configured in a way that would help resolve some key issues. Sorry. Jena, if you can go next. Yep. Or there's other things where maybe you don't really have the right people in to help manage and optimize the system. Maybe you're not staffed well enough or it's not staffed with the right people. Or your team really hasn't been engaged in change management. So there's poor user adoption just from a change management perspective, or you haven't adopted really good data government governance where there's kind of clear rules for data entry, maintenance, and reporting, which then ends up with people using the system in all different ways and it being very ineffective. So as much as people want to think that technology is always the magic pill, there's a lot of other pieces that go into that that need to be thought about before, embarking on a huge huge change. And, Jena, I'll pass this over to you for a fit gap analysis. Okay. So, whether, you know, you feel like you already know if you should make the switch or if you're still trying to decide, you wanna, like Casey said, make sure that there isn't something else that's causing you to be unhappy with the technology. So performing a fit gap analysis allows you to work with all of your stakeholders to document every specific function that needs to happen, focusing on what the outcome of that function is, and those would be considered user stories. And then you can have either an internal team member who is a system expert, so if you're on the razor's edge have your razor's edge database manager or subject matter expert, or you can hire a third party consultant, or sometimes even ask the vendor to go through all your user stories and say what the system can do and what the system can't do. And for some of these, you might have to say, yep, the system can do this, but it would require additional configuration. So the reason why we're not able to do that right now is not necessarily because it's a limitation with the system, but because we would need to make some configuration changes. Or maybe the system can do what we need it to, but we have some data hygiene issues and we would need to clean up that data before we could use an automated workflow functionality, let's say. Another option is that you would need to change your process or training. Let's say you want to leverage your CRM for moves management. All your gift officers are using spreadsheets, so it may not be that your CRM can't do use management or portfolio management functionality, but you would have to change your processes so that your staff know that they're required to use that module within the system and change, you know, potentially provide training for them so they feel comfortable doing what they're doing in Excel but in the CRM instead. You might potentially need a customization to be developed for, to use a certain functionality or have to integrate with another tool. Let's say you are, for the most part, happy with your CRM, but you need auction functionality. You can integrate with another tool that provides auction, or you need integration with your finance system for, effective reconciliation or effective posting, or it might just be that the system can't meet that specific user story. So if it's determined that most of the needs can't be met or you would have to spend a lot of money in customizations or integrations, then a switch might be warranted. And I know this might seem like this is a time consuming exercise, but you could turn all these user stories into your requirements that you could then put into an RFP for your system selection. Or they can get used as your roadmap if you do decide you're going to stay with the system to say, okay we need to make these configuration changes this quarter, next quarter we're going to do the data cleanup, the following quarter we'll train our people and update the documentation, and then within a year you could start to maximize that functionality. So financial impact. So like we said, that may cost money to have to pay for a customization or pay for an integration, and it might be worth looking at another system if you're gonna have to be adding all these additional costs. And a lot of the technology vendors can give you an ROI on what they're seeing other nonprofits, increase their revenue from a fundraising standpoint once they move to the new CRM. But sometimes seeing how much it would cost to go to another system and how that might be cheaper than paying to customize or integrate your current isn't motivation enough for some internal stakeholders. So sometimes you have to go back to what Casey was sharing earlier is, what is the cost of not changing? Is it impacting your current constituent experience? Is it the current donation forms making it too hard to donate or too hard to register for an event, so people are just moving on to other things because it's too much effort? Or is your staff, you know, having to do these manual tasks instead of being out fundraising? What is the cost to have your staff do all this manual work instead of having the technology do it? And if there there's limitations with how you can use your system to maintain your data, is it putting your company's reputation at risk? I know we've all received that email appeal or direct mail appeal where it says Dear Blaustein instead of Dear Schaeffer, and that that impacts your reputation and whether donors think that you're actually putting their money to good use if you can't even address them right in an appeal. And timing matters also. So even if you decide, yes, okay, I said our existing CRM does not meet our needs. There's other CRMs out there in the market that we know that they can. The timing matters. That doesn't mean that, you know, you jump ship because you, you know, your subscription for your current CRM is up in three months, so you hustle to make that change to the new system. There's a lot more time and effort that needs to be put into it, and it may not always be the best time to make a switch. So while most data migrations or implementations are gonna take eight to twelve months, you do wanna add that four to six months to really evaluate all of the systems that are available on the market and see which ones align with your user stories to select your new system. There's visioning, data hygiene, and other readiness activities that we're gonna talk about in a few moments that take a couple of months also. So after you take those four to six months to select a system, two to three months for your readiness, another eight to twelve for the implementation, and then you always wanna give yourself that padding of one to four months for contingency. Let's say you lose a staff member. The vendor that you select might have a backlog. They can't start their implementation right away. You have a big gala, and it's all hands on deck for a couple of months. All these things need to be timed in. And totaling up, it could take you at least two fiscal years before you are actually on the new system. And that's gonna be taking a lot of staff, probably 200 over those two years. So it's not something that can just happen, you know, within a couple months of you making that decision from your FIT GAP analysis. And then again, even if you make that decision, you're ready to change, not everyone on your staff might be on board. People might already have a lot on their plate and they have really limited time to devote to a conversion or to learn new technology. You might have organizational silos that is causing people to have completely different goals, when it comes to picking what the new solution is. The talked about data hygiene being an issue, knowing that you need to take time to do deduping and clean things up. You might not have anyone on staff that has experience with selecting or implementing a new system, or you just have not have anyone on staff that really has the capacity to do documentation or lead the project. So there's any number of reasons, around capacity, people's availability, the budget, that even if it totally makes sense to make the change, why you might still face some resistance within your team. So we're going to talk a little bit about what you can do to get everyone in the team onboard and heading in the right direction with this change. Casey, you wanna talk us through how to best prepare for the CRM change? Love to do that. Yep. So, one thing that I think always sounds hokey but actually ends up being really important, is making sure that the teams are all on the same page about what you're trying to get out of a new CRM. We've often seen where different groups within an organization will be thinking that they're getting a new CRM for this purpose or this purpose, and there's not alignment on how you configure, how you set up, how you set up your rules and your processes to support that part that process. So this is a really important step. You can go to the next page, Jena. It really helps to make sure, you know, the decisions that you make are, like, aligned with your strategy, with the outcomes. It helps you to really be able to make quick quick decisions because, you know, not all not every CRM is gonna meet all your needs. There's gonna be pros and cons and trade offs between all of them, and it also helps you to just configure and implement the systems optimally to stay on time and on budget and meeting your ultimate goals. And it also helps you all to act as a unified team and realize the full daddy the full value of your data, your technology, and your investments. Again, it always, no one ever loves going into much of a vision session, but I can tell you it really is helpful for the team. A lot of times, people, the high touch team will have a very different view than the the data team or all these different groups, and it's really important for everyone to come together. Alright, so we have another poll for everyone. So kind of reflecting on how Casey has described a CRM visioning exercise, if you don't mind responding with how well aligned do you think your organization is? If you were to make a switch, you know, is everyone on the same page with the CRM vision? Are you well aligned? Have you facilitated maybe similar exercises with a visioning session and it's very clear strategy and goals in place? Or maybe you feel like you're semi aligned and you haven't really participated in anything formal, but everyone misaligned, like Casey mentioned, different teams can have very different views of where directionally the CRM needs to go. Or maybe just everyone is just too busy and that just, you know, seems like a completely overwhelming task. So it looks like a lot of you are semi aligned or too busy, which I think seems pretty pretty, accurate based on what we've seen. So yeah. And you need to fill out that poll if you haven't had a chance to do that. Another thing that's really helpful as part of the process in getting ready for a CRM selection is defining your crew or your team or how the selection process is gonna go. So, here are some different groups that we recommend as part of the process. Obviously, it's all dependent on your size of your organization in order if you need all of these teams. But, typically, there's, like, an executive sponsor group. And so this these are the people who are really just advocating for the change. They're securing the budget, and they're aligning the strategy with the organizational goals. There's also a project steering committee. So this is kind of the team that would would kind of, provide oversight, resolve road roadblocks, ultimately make the decision based on the CRM implementation team's recommendation. And then there's a really hands on team, a CRM selection implementation team. So this is a dedicated staff who are handling the selection, helping to review user stories, sitting in demos, and then ultimately moving ahead into data migration, helping with system migration, testing, and integrations. And then you always have business process owners or what we like to call SMEs. So these are representatives from key departments. You know, you might have a peer to peer, you might have an SMS expert, things like that that you might be bringing in and out throughout the project. In addition, it would be great, and I know a lot of organizations don't have this yet, but having a data governance team so this team is really responsible for the data standards, the quality control, everything you need to maintain your system's integrity. And this really helps everyone to get in the line with how are we entering data, how are we using data, how are we reporting on data so that someone's like, oh, my report isn't tying from here to here, or this information looks inaccurate. And then if you're a larger organization and have internal teams that can do training and change management, this helps to do user adoption through training and documentation and ongoing support. Sometimes these might be in the form of a superuser. Sometimes this might be outsourced or internal. And then making sure your help desk and support team, is there to provide implementation assistance and troubleshooting to the staff. And then as, Jena was alluding to, you know, part of the process of selecting, a solution is not only to get to an end goal of a solution, but it's also to bring people along in a journey. Oops. It looks like we might have lost Jena there for a second on the content, Scott. Yeah. You can keep going. I'll share my screen, and we'll, keep going on. So what happens sometimes is it's part of the selection process is a wonderful time to implement change management, bringing people on a journey. Some people can be really wedded going into a selection to say, hey. I really know I want this particular solution. You know, my friend uses it over at this nonprofit. I heard it works really great. I used it at my last solution. It worked great. And then maybe, you know, the the organization chooses a different solution. And then there's really poor user adoption because, hey. You didn't choose the solution I wanted. I said, I don't really feel like using it. I don't think it's that great. But if you can really bring people along in the journey and understand, you know, what are the needs, what are the, oops. It looks like you're on your, sorry about that. So, you know, what are the needs that we have as we move along? What is in the marketplace that we think would be helpful to meet those needs? What are the pros and cons? All of these solutions have different pros and cons that will meet your needs. You're not they're not gonna meet all of your needs. So it's a great way to bring your team along throughout this process. So we tend to use what's called ADKAR, which is just a change management, process that we use throughout the throughout this selection. And it really helps the team to come along and at the end, ultimately understand why the organization made that selection, and it helps with user adoption throughout that process. And I think we're back a little bit from this, Scott. Maybe go back one more. Yeah. So this is the this is the slide that we were on. So ADKAR really stands for creating awareness. You know, what's the awareness or the need for the change, understanding the desire and support to change, the knowledge on how to change, and the ability to implement the change and then reinforcement of that change. So it's really a great way, and that's why it's great to have a core team or others involved throughout the whole process, and not make it, you know, oh, IT just selected this solution for us. This is bringing your team along throughout the whole process and making them feel engaged and empowered and wanting to use the system. Alright. Over to you, Jennifer. Hey, everyone. Sorry about that. I live in a rural area, so my Wi Fi can't be trusted. Alright. Am I still sharing, or did Scott take over for us? I think Scott took over. He's on readying your data. Yeah. I wanna I wanna took over, so I I'm coming from behind stage to the stage. Glad to see everybody. I'm real, by the way. The person chatting in the chat, it's me. So I'll I'll go ahead and drive for the rest of it. That way y'all can just be presenting and, we'll smooth sailing. Thank you. Alright. So like we mentioned before, there's, in addition to the visioning and preparing your team and getting everyone on the same page, you also have to get your data ready. So you might be on a CRM right now that has a license model and you're moving to one that is based on record count. So it's critical to be doing deduping in your current system so you're not getting charged for duplicates. If there's records that are inactive, deceased, you know just ones that you know you're not going to be including in reporting or including in your appeals to go ahead and archive them. And then also doing a security audit. So some of you that work for larger organizations that have a ton of users, you don't necessarily want to be setting up all those users in your new system. So going through and identifying who should be set up in the new system, who should not be. Of the users that should be set up in the new system, looking at what their current security is, is their current security applicable to what their role is now, has their role changed maybe since when they were first added to the new system? And then kind of just building that out as you're preparing to select and implement a system so you're not rushing to do this cleanup and the security design during the implementation. Great. And so now we'll walk you through, this is really the Berna & Scott methodology for selection. So just kinda giving you a little insight into how we kind of run a selection, within the organization. This is just talking a little bit more about what we've already talked about before we dive in, but, you know, kind of the the value and objective of of a selection process is to really ensure successful implementation and adoption, not just choosing a solution. So, you know, throughout this process, really avoiding what we call, you know, paving the CAL path. You know, you put a new system in while you still do all the same processes, so trying to avoid that. Creating user stories that really clarify your vision or your long term, goals, not just what you're doing today. Helping to minimize any any surprises during implementation that you're really aware of what the system can and cannot do, where the downfalls are. Selecting a solution that most aligns to your needs, your culture, and your resources, and then help to, like I mentioned before, pave the way for full user adoption that people are part of that entire selection process and ensuring this decision withstands the test of time. No one wants to be changing a CRM every couple years. So, ensuring this is something that's gonna last a long time. So there are four different, I would call, phases of a selection that we like to do, facilitate, ideate, evaluate, and navigate, and we'll go through each of these in a high level. I wanna go to the next slide. Yeah. So during the facilitation phase, this is really a chance for us to get to know, get a shared understanding of the organization. So a lot of times, we'll ask for background documents to get information, you know, about your current technology stack, stack integration, processes, organizational, hierarchies. Then we'll run a bunch of stakeholder interviews to understand what is and what isn't working well, what are key user stories and goals, and then we also do run vision sessions. And these conversations really begin to pivot from kind of your past or current state to kind of a future state. It really gives stakeholders a voice and a chance to kind of plant seeds of what the new future could bring. Sometimes I like to think about them as therapy sessions, because people do really vent quite a bit, but, they are they are interesting nonetheless. And then really once this the completion of this phase is the organization will really have a solid understanding of where the future starts to shift. So from here, we can start to move into the ideate stage, and this is where we can start to think about a more constituent centric model. So a lot of times people like to think about, well, what does this solution do for me and my, my department, as opposed to starting to think about how does this best serve the constituent and what our ultimate goals are for the for our organization. So we end up building a map of our our external constituents and the ways in which we engage with them. We end up finalizing that shared vision dot statement, and then we start to document all the key use cases of a solution, that are needed by that organization. And then we do facilitate a marketplace overview. So based on the vision, based on the user stories, based on budget, we would then meet with the organization to say, hey. Here are some particular, solutions your organization might want to consider. And it's an open dialogue conversation. The organization might add some, delete some based on preferences or knowledge, and then we start to develop a request for proposal. Once that, during the evaluate phase, we issue that RFP. The vendors will meet with the teams and go over any kind of discovery questions or follow ups that they have. And then we do conduct scripted software demonstrations so that each vendor has the same script that they're reading off of, and I'll talk about this a little bit later. It's not a dog and pony show about, hey. Look at all these pretty shiny things I can do over here, and I'm not gonna show you the things I can't do. It really allows you to do an apples to apples comparison. We perform a five year cost, analysis. We help the organization, support them in their vendor references. We don't conduct them ourselves. And then we conduct a meeting with the team with all the evaluation results. So, looking at, the proposal and their review of that, the cost, the reference checks, the discovery questions, the, demonstration scripts. And we get together with the team, and we help to facilitate, a meeting for them to choose a solution. We do never we never choose a solution for the organization, but we help them to navigate that process. Once that's done, we then can help them to develop a full implementation roadmap. Maybe they're choosing several solutions and they want to phase these. Maybe they have different things they need to have in place, so we help to navigate that road map. And I think it sounds like we have a question from the audience that you may get this at some point, but do you have any resources that help to compare different CRMs next to each other, both functionality and maybe also price points? So we do do a little bit of that in the market place overview that we do do with clients. It is very specific to clients and their needs, their budgets, their key areas that might differentiate them from other organizations, to help them select certain solutions. Any questions on that approach that we tend to do there? I think that's the only question we got, coming in, and so we'll kinda keep fielding them, through the q and a, feature, but we can kinda we can keep moving today. That sounds great. Awesome. Alright. So lastly, on this section, just some common selection pitfalls that we've seen. So a lot of times, people say, I just wanna see a demo. I just wanna move into the demo, and they haven't actually clearly defined what their business needs are, and what the user stories are and what the constituent needs are. They just say, hey. I need an email marketing tool. I heard this one's good, so let's just grab that one. Fail failure to involve the key stakeholders. I have seen this a hundred times where people will just use the IT staff to choose a solution without involving front end use end users who are ultimately responsible for the results on that solution. This can be really hard to have user adoption, and change management and all of that. So really making sure you involve the key stakeholders, and that also goes in line with change management bringing all those along. And then as Jena had touched about touched on, underestimating any customization versus out of box needs. So yeah. Yeah. We like that solution. It'll be fine and understanding kinda where the gaps are and and customization cost that may arise. And then conducting unscripted demos, as I mentioned before. This really is a time where if you it's very easy for a vendor to go and show you all the pretty things that their solution can do, but without getting into the I always say the devils are in the details, because not like I said, not every solution can do everything. So understanding where the, areas are that may not meet exactly your needs and what you might need to do to work around that, and getting kind of an apples to apples comparison is always really helpful. Alright. Now I'm gonna pass it over to Jena to talk about implementation. Okay. So you've selected your system and you are ready to make the change, and everyone wants to just jump in feet first, embrace the change, but we do want to just talk through some of the common mistakes that organizations make as they are going through their implementation process. So the vendor is going to give you a plan, and it's probably a great plan, but it's not necessarily a fair expectation for the vendor to know all of your internal moving pieces within your organization. So that means that you need to have your own plan that is inclusive of the vendor's plan, but it is specific to your organization. So the vendor is going to assign a project manager and create a project work plan, but you need your own internal project manager that's going to be managing your team, any third party vendors, whether you have a direct marketing agency, a caging company, that all has to be managed by you separately. The vendor is going to be managing their internal resources, their conversion analysts, their trainers, their quality assurance, but you will also need to be managing your internal team too. And then again taking that vendor's project plan and making it part of your comprehensive project plan, incorporating those readiness pre conversion cleanup tasks that we talked about earlier, any time period when you know you have overlapping resource demands. We talked about if you have a gala or some other fundraising event, audit season, anytime you know that the staff that is going to be involved in the implementation might also be getting pulled into these other priorities to making sure that you're accounting for that in your plan. And then creating a communications matrix. So you want to make sure all of the people in your organization that care either about the CRM or the data that comes out of the CRM is informed of the project status. And you want to make sure that you aren't over communicating to the point where people kind of just zone out and they don't really pay attention but you get the frequency right and the method. Are there people that you need to be joining their team meetings and talking about the status versus ones that are fine with just an email? So getting that all put in place before you kick off. And then leveraging a tool for tracking any issues, action items, key decisions, as well as a risk inventory. Action items, key decisions, as well as a risk inventory. So again the vendors might be tracking an element of that, but you'll need to take what the vendor is tracking and adding on your own internal pieces. Okay, so some of the common mistakes. So the vendor is going to give you a test plan. Again, the vendor has great intentions and they have tons of experience and this could probably a really good test plan, but it's not a fair expectation for the vendor to know all of your user scenarios that are very specific to your organization. So you want to make sure that you take what the vendor offers and that you are going through the test plan that they offer, but that you are going through that fit gap assessment that we talked through earlier and making sure that you are testing all of those critical scenarios. You know, you want to make sure that you're opening up your legacy system, alongside the new CRM and going field by field within some of your critical records and making sure that it's mapped to the right place, there's not anything missing. And you also want to do that quantitative, so run a Libunt report in your legacy system, run a Libunt report in the new system. Are those counts matching? Do annual statements in your legacy system run it alongside the new system? Are those counts matching? So remember that the vendor doesn't necessarily have access to your legacy system, so that's going to be on you to be doing that side by side comparison. And then again making sure you're including the right people. So invite your caging company to do the testing. Have them test doing an upload. Have your direct mail agency give you a file and test them. Anyone that's in your CRM system currently invite them to be a part of that testing process to make sure you validate all the critical processes during that test period. And then of course after I tell you all this important stuff testing I'm going to say but don't get lost in the data migration and don't get lost in the testing. That is a huge focus of the implementation is the data migration, but there is a tendency for organizations to focus on currently doing things in your old CRM and you try and then replicate that in your new CRM and it tends to make it overly complex and then you're not open to looking at the new functionality that you didn't have. So try to, you know, embrace what the new functionality is and not kind of get stuck in, oh this is the way we've always done it, so this is the way we need to do it. So you can really just remove that complexity and foster creativity. Ask yourselves these questions like what processes have to stay, which ones can we just get rid of now that we have this new functionality, Which processes need to be developed? And which ones need to, you know, just need to change? And then make sure that you're documenting that. So in your old system that you've been on for twenty plus years, it was probably really easy to deprioritize training and documentation because you've had the system for twenty years and everyone knew it, but now you have this new system, you are going to Take advantage of Take advantage of the vendor led training, but also create an internal training plan, maybe leveraging the train the trainer method that is tailored around these new processes that we're creating, and make that an ongoing priority so you don't end up in this place with your new system where you can't maximize the functionality because you're not making an investment in the training. But don't rush. So everyone might be getting excited for this new functionality and you, you know, have the, winds of excitement and you wanna ride that and you might say, like, okay, we need to be live by this date because this is when, you know, your CRM, legacy CRM, is, going to be shutting down. You don't want to rush to those false deadlines. So be prepared with what is a minimum criteria for us to feel comfortable to go live. And if for some reason the testing doesn't, user accepting testing doesn't say yes we're ready to go live, well what is your plan? Have a gono go plan so that way you're not just saying, like, okay. This is the date we said we were live. We're just gonna be live. Make sure that you're actually ready, all the test issues have been resolved, everything has been fleshed out, the team is trained, and you'll have a more successful adoption that way. But the adoption doesn't end when you're live, so it's really tempting to say, like, okay, we're live, we're done, but there is things that still need to happen. This is probably not going to be your last technology change after you do your CRM. You might have your accounting system that happens next or you might have some digital engagement systems that have to get changed. So if you did make mistakes during this implementation, you don't wanna make them again with another system. So do a project retrospective. Talk about what went well. Celebrate what went well, but be honest with what didn't so that way you can prepare same mistake for your future technology changes. And then Casey talked about the ongoing CRM and data governance. So most likely, you're not gonna be able to implement every new feature in your new system day one of go live. That there's gonna be some features that you push for stage two or a later time. So make sure you have that framework in place to talk about when it makes sense to adopt the new functionality, what has to change within your data in order to maximize that new functionality. And that should be something that's happening ongoing, and it's not just specific to your implementation. Jena, thanks so much. You and Casey, just provided so much, as far as wisdom expertise. Just a reminder for everybody, we do have the slide deck, that you can download in the doc section, and we're also gonna be emailing that out. We also have a resource for you there as well from us, a CRM conversion guide. And so, please take both of those and use those, hopefully, to serve you and your team. We are gonna actually toss it over to Carly here as we jump into what it might look like to explore responsive CRM. And one of the things that's unique about, I think our team is that we're, full of people who have sat in your seat and who have, lived the life of a fundraiser, of a DBA, of a development director, and and all of those things. And Carly herself has done that, but, also, also has walked through CRM conversion and understands the process. So she's gonna, take over now and walk us through what it looks like to explore a responsive CRM. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Jen and Casey, for walking through that. You know, if I was watching this webinar, I might be thinking, wow, this is really intimidating. There's so many steps and technology and details of going through a CRM transition. I would highly recommend using our CRM conversion playbook that's in the doc section there regardless of what CRM that you're going to migrate to. It basically walks you through what type of functionality are you looking for all the way to how do you manage your teams and their change management. So it's super helpful. I highly recommend you look at that. But let me talk a little bit about what a responsive CRM is. Hey. Hey, Carly. Real quick as you do that. Just a reminder. So real quick, could you if you could turn your mic on and off, we're having a little bit of an issue, hearing that. So if you could change the selection, then change it back, and I think it'll fix that. But while you do that, just a reminder too, we are gonna we're wrapping up. So Carly's gonna kinda wrap us up here, but we have some q and a time still. So if you haven't already, submit your q and a questions in the q and a tab. We would love to be able to take those, and help. So I'll toss it back to Carly, and we'll keep going. Does that better, Scott, or no? It sounds beautiful. Thank you very much. Okay. So what we see in the fundraising world right now is this unresponsive one to many donor experiences. So this is the idea where we're sending out mass mailings, you can move to the next slide, where you're just giving the same communication really to everyone. So whether that's someone who came to an event or who gave a gift, or maybe they did some type of advocacy. We're just doing this one to many communication, but that's not really the world that we're living in anymore. Fundraising has changed as well as our world has really changed. We all live in this world where we have Netflix and Amazon, and we have super personalized experiences with these organizations. So you log into your account, they know exactly what your behavior is, and they can give you suggestions based on that behavior. And that's what we're trying to do in the fundraising space as well, which is what we're calling this responsive model for generosity. The way that we explain that is through responsive fundraising. We see this as four different, I'd say key areas. It starts with really listening to your donors. What is it that they're telling you? Right? They're always giving you some type of behavioral insight, whether it's what channel they prefer to be communicated to or what their wealth data is or how they interact on social media. But you have to have a database that allows you to actually listen and keep that information so that then you can connect with them based on that. So if they prefer communicating a certain way or they have a certain interest, you wanna be able to connect with them in that way. Just like when Netflix recommends your favorite show to you based on your past viewer history, we wanna do the same thing when we're talking to our donors. The third is to suggest. So often in the fundraising world we think that the next step is to ask for a financial gift and maybe that is the next step, but sometimes that suggestion could be a volunteer suggestion, a social media advocacy suggestion. Virtuous can help you figure out what that next best step is based on those, donor behavioral insights you've been learning. And then the last step is to learn, just to continue learning if this process is working with each donor, seeing how it's working, testing, and going back and continuing to learn what they're telling you, and connecting and figuring out that next best ask. But let's look at it, from an actual, campaign standpoint. So instead of that one to many campaign, slide that I showed a few slides ago, this shows what we'd call responsive campaigns, which allows you to respond specifically based on what that donor's latest activity is and putting them through a specific journey to them. So whether they came to an event or they got a mail piece or they downloaded a piece of content, they're now getting a journey that's specific to them, whether that's a text message or an automated postcard or a phone call from someone. That's all being, done through the system. There we go. Here we go. Yeah. Alright. We got you now. You're back. Okay. This is an example of one specific person. She attended an event. She gets a few follow-up pieces specific to that. She visits the site. A follow-up she gives. A follow-up again very specific. Next slide has a couple of more breaking this down by whether it's a new donor, a lapsed donor, someone that downloaded a content piece or retargeting. Again, having very specific donor journeys so that each donor really feels like they're being treated personally, like they have a personal relationship with your organization. So Virtuous has a lot of different facets in it all in one in one place from the actual CRM to automation to email to online giving. I know before we had Virtuous, it felt like we had many siloed systems. We had an email system and a direct mail system and then a database system, and we were taking Excel sheets between those systems. But, really, Virtuous is the only responsive fundraising platform, and our whole goal is to build personal connections with donors at scale and grow giving for each nonprofit organization that we work with. So we we have another poll coming live, and this is if you'd like to chat with our team. So if you do want a demo of Virtuous or want to talk with us or see, hey. We wanna maybe hear what the conversion process looks like a little further on our end and and be able to combine that with the content that you've got today. We would love to connect with you. And so if you would like one, go ahead and answer that poll. We're gonna leave that up here, for a bit. You can click the red dot or the poll tab with the red dot, and we would love to connect with you and your team. And I'd also love to toss it back over to Jena and Casey just to be able to talk through as well some of the ways that Berna & Scott can help, in this process. But, again, even, like, hear us say today, like, we wanna really help you navigate this process. If Virtuous is the right answer, that's awesome. We love that. That may not be depending on where you're at and your needs. And I know Barker & Scott can kinda really help, in that process. So, Casey, can I toss that over to you as you kinda walk through some of this? Yeah. That'd be great. Awesome. And you can probably yeah. So, so I think any of the pieces that we outlined here today, as it relates to preparation, selection, some partial implementation support, is anything that Barker & Scott can help you with. We also do a lot of governance work. We do, IT assessment work. And I think I just wanted to also just note we, are always vendor agnostic. So we have no ties to any vendors, and we often do refer over utilize Virtuous as part of the process as well. But we have no ties, and we ultimately just want to, stay up to date on each of the vendors, what they're doing, what's on their road map, and then use that information to impart knowledge on you to help you with your best selection. So if there's any ways that we can help you throughout a selection, through other types of support that we offer, we would be happy to partner with you on that process and really appreciate your time today. That's fantastic. Alright. I know everyone's sad, but this is the last poll for today. Alright. Last poll. We're opening it now, and that's if you, would like to talk with Barker & Scott and really explore, some of not only what they've walked through today, but maybe what the selection process can look like for you and your organization. So please, go ahead. Last poll open now, in the poll tab above. We would love for you to answer that. And we're so grateful for, you all being here. Again, we are gonna send out the recording, and so you'll have that. You'll have the slide deck. You can grab that, the CRM conversion guide in the docs tab. So please make sure, to do that. And please reach out too if you have questions. Again, you heard from from everyone today whose, whose heart really is to help and serve nonprofits. That's that's where we're at. We wanna see generosity grow. We wanna see, technology and data used in a way, that makes your job easier, that makes, fundraising more efficient, and, ultimately, that drives your mission forward. And so we would love to help. I know Mark and Scott would love to help, however that might look like. So don't hesitate to reach out. We would love to connect with you. And we're also gonna open up here just as we end, a a quick survey. Although, I do think, Casey, do you have, we have a final slide here, and so I'd love to let you share that, and then I can share our survey survey and we'll end for the day. I, yeah, I think it's, just a little quote that we put in here that's just, you know, it's important to understand that the change is not the launch of the new software system. The two the true change is really how people do their work, collaborate, and make decisions. So, it's not just a plug and play with your technology, but it is, thinking through all the other components as well. Yeah. Well, we appreciate you all being here. Anthony, I do see your question. I'm actually we're actually gonna follow-up directly with you just in regard to experience, making that transition. So I see that, and we will definitely, be in touch. But I'm also going to, share a survey today. So we always wanna know, hey. Was this helpful? How can we get better at providing really great content for you? So I would love for you all to fill that out. That just gives us a little bit of feedback to say this was great, or there's some ways we can improve, or this is the value that I took. It also helps us understand how you heard about it so we can help more people in your shoes. Hopefully, get some really great content that's helpful for them. So that survey is launched. You should be seeing that now. We'd love for you to take that. And, again, we're really grateful for you being here. We'll send out these resources. We'll have some more webinars. I'm sure some more content collaboration with our friends at Barker & Scott coming up as well. But we're so glad that you're here, and we hope that this has been helpful today. So thank you, and we will see you next time. Thanks, everyone.