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Effective Charity Data: When Spreadsheets Fail and When to Move to a CRM System 

Person stressed at their computer about all of the spreadsheets they have to keep track of their data. While others ask them for help with their devices.

In this blog, we identify aigns that spreadsheets are no longer sufficient for managing data and why a CRM system is the solution. 

Spreadsheets have powered the world for the last 30 years. They are incredibly useful and powerful. And so it’s really easy to use them more than really we ought to. If the only tool you have is a spreadsheet, every problem looks like a table of data. 

But you probably wouldn’t write a letter in Excel  – there are better tools for that job.  

For some organisations, a spreadsheet is perfectly good tool for the job. One of the best CRM tools I ever saw (25 years ago) was a master sheet of hand-written mailing labels. This could be photocopied onto blank sheets of mailing labels when a mail-out needed doing. That organisation just needed to be able to send out physical mail every few weeks to a mailing list of about 30. And when someone needed to be added or removed, it was easy to update the master sheet. It worked, it was quick and easy to operate. Genius. 

But nowadays, most charities need to do quite a lot more than that with their data. The natural place to start is a spreadsheet: it works, it’s quick and easy to operate. But they also have a nasty tendency to hang around too long. They become a drag on the organisation and often are duplicated too.  

Here’s our top 5 signs that it’s time to retire your spreadsheets and move to a charity CRM system. 

Sign 1: Too Many Spreadsheets 

Aka Spreadsheet proliferation. This can happen when no-one challenges the fateful words “I’ll just create a new spreadsheet for that”. 

Does each member of your team have their own set of spreadsheets? Or lots of versions of the same spreadsheet? Or information that belongs together ending up split between lots of different files? 

The problem with this is that you can easily lose track of what’s where, and which ones are accurate and up to date. And if you need to pull things together for some reason – send out a mailing to everyone, say, or run reports across the whole organisation – that can be seriously painful. 

Sign 2: More Info Than’ll Fit On A Row or a Screen 

Aka Scrolling forever. This new funder for the project asks for a different set of reporting measures, so we’ll just add a few columns for those. And then we have approximately 30 yes/no columns for identified needs. So to see it all you end up scrolling across to column BX… ick. Especially when you also need to see their name (in column A) and address (in columns AD – AH). 

A variant of this is when one person has multiple pieces of data. Most obviously, attendances at sessions. One temptation is to keep adding columns, one for each session, with yes-no when they come along. 

Or you end up with a second worksheet to record that information… somehow linked to the first. But the links are flaky and now you’re not 100% confident that the two worksheets are linked correctly. 

Sign 3: Is This Information Too Sensitive To Keep on the Shared Drive? 

Aka Everyone Can See Everything. And they probably shouldn’t. 

Perhaps you avoided Sign 1 – too many spreadsheets – by creating a single master spreadsheet on the shared drive. And so now everyone can access it… and see everything… and change anything. 

Whether this is a problem will depend on what you do and what information you store. Even if it’s OK for everyone to be able to see it, there’s still plenty of scope for accidental changes to data. 

Sign 4: Our Data Is Seriously Messy 

Aka Everything is a text field. 

You have to spend quite a bit of effort to enforce data, and in our experience people don’t. So your data ends up seriously messy. Some of the most common things we see when organisations sign up to Lamplight: 

  • Names in a single field AND SOME IN ALL CAPS and others not 
  • Addresses in a single field 
  • Duplication 
  • Many different spellings of the same thing – free text ethnicity is a classic of this genre 
  • Dates in every possible format (16/1/2025 16.1.2025, 16 Jan ’25, 2025/16-1…) 
  • Cells use colours to represent data 
  • Duplication 

There are two big downsides here. One is that it takes longer to enter the data. If you’re having to type in ethnicity instead of using a pick list, it’s slower. And if you need to run reports, you have to go through and manually add up all those things that are the same but differently recorded. Your computer can’t help you. 

Sign 5: And it’s really hard to use 

If any of these are familiar, then it’s likely that dealing with data is a serious chore. It doesn’t help your day-to-day work, and you can easily gain any insights from it. It’s just a thing that’s grown up around you, slowly and without anyone really noticing. New team members, new projects, some extra reporting… all contribute to the gradual spreadsheet malaise. No-one’s to blame, it’s just happened. 

A good charity CRM like Lamplight can bring everything together into one place. You’ll have clean data that serves your work, is easy to use, makes reporting quick, and provides data you can reflect on.  

Photo by Prostock-studio

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