If you’ve already got a CRM system for your non-profit: that’s great. Looking after your data well is crucial for non-profits, and a system that serves your work can make a real difference.
It can take a bit of investment to get to that point – getting it set up, training your team, and integrating it into day-to-day work patterns. If you’ve put that effort in, you want it to last.
All systems need some maintenance. Like my bike needs some oil and new brake pads every now and then, your CRM will benefit from a regular spring clean. Inevitably things change: new projects start and others close; new reporting requirements are introduced; and staff come and go. At Lamplight we offer free annual review calls with an experienced implementer to help you do some of this – if you’re a Lamplight customer and you’ve not had one recently, please contact us in the Help System and book a time for a call.
But sometimes, for whatever reason, your existing system is no longer appropriate and you need to change to a new system. The very thought may strike you with fear. The good news is that this doesn’t have to be a painful, expensive process.
Your Data Is Probably In Good Shape
If you are moving from a well-structured system (a relational database structure) then the chances are that your data is reasonably well structured, and hopefully fairly clean. You can hopefully also extract your data without too much trouble, in a format that’s going to make moving it to a new system pretty straightforward.
Data migration gets tricky (i.e. it takes longer) when it’s coming from Excel (or Word documents) and lots of tidying up is needed before it can be imported.
The other advantage is that you should be able to take all your settings from one system to another without needing to spend lots of time thinking about them. What sorts of fields you have, options that appear in them – all that sort of thing can be moved across again without too much effort.
A System Built For Non-Profits Probably Doesn’t Need Much Building
If you start with generic CRM software, or software built with a different context in mind, then you will likely have to spend a fair amount of effort adapting it to the particular things your non-profit needs. This can mount up quickly – we’ve heard horrifying stories from charities that have taken this road. Just this week one of our customers showed Lamplight to a friend in another charity… who were spending thousands of pounds a month on their Dynamics based system. His eyes popped out of his head when he saw what Lamplight could do and the pricing.
If you’re moving to a CRM built specifically for charities, you don’t need to pay someone to re-invent those wheels. They’ve already done the hard yards and so setting it all up should just be a case of configuring what’s there to your particular needs.
Your Team Are Used To Using A CRM Already
For many of our customers, Lamplight is their first CRM. For them, one of the big internal changes can be moving from “everyone-having-their-own-personal-data-and-systems” to a shared platform that supports the whole organisation. Figuring out who’s got what data, what they need to be able to do with it, and then prising it out of their hands and getting buy-in to a single system… that can take some time and work. We know it’s worth it, but it can take a while to get there.
But if your team are already used to using a CRM system – you’re already there! You’ve done that work once, and it’s not going to be needed again. Of course there will be some learning and getting used to a new system. Even this should be less involved than for staff moving from no system, because many of the concepts will be familiar.
Take The Opportunity To Critically Reflect On Your Processes
Our customers regularly tell us how much they’ve appreciated the implementation process because they get to take some time to really think about and reflect on their processes. Because we have to really understand them, we’ll keep asking questions, poking around to make sure we’ve covered everything. For the team in the charity, having to lay everything out and explain it to us can be a really instructive experience. They discover opportunities to simplify and streamline that they’d not seen before.
In other words, moving to a new CRM can bring other less obvious benefits. It probably shouldn’t be your reason for moving, but maybe you would benefit from some experienced, external eyes taking a friendly look over it all.
Photo by Zoran Zeremski
