The truth is that moving to the Nonprofit Cloud may be right for some nonprofits at this time and not for others. While Salesforce has not shared an end-of-life date for NPSP and plans to continue supporting it, we know that their investment and innovation will be focused on Nonprofit Cloud. That’s why it’s important to understand as much as you can about any new product so that you can make a well-informed decision that supports your nonprofit’s goals and strategies.

With that in mind, let’s look at some concerns we’ve heard circulating in the sector about the new Nonprofit Cloud and our take on those topics.

Shedding Light on Three Concerns About the New Nonprofit Cloud

1. The cost of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

One concern about the new Nonprofit Cloud is that implementing it will be much more expensive than implementing the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). But the reality is not that simplistic.

For one thing, the ecosystem around the new Nonprofit Cloud – including customers, partners, and arguably even Salesforce employees – are still learning the new tools in the offering. And while Salesforce partners might anticipate that a Nonprofit Cloud implementation will require more hours than an NPSP implementation due to the learning curve, that doesn’t necessarily mean that additional costs will be passed directly to customers. In fact, here at Heller Consulting, we’ve already invested time in learning in order to mitigate high costs in Nonprofit Cloud projects to make them feasible for nonprofits.

Also, the cost of implementing the Nonprofit Cloud versus NPSP is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Each solution comes with different features and functionality out-of-the-box. Some of those will matter more or less to different nonprofit customers, and some customers will be willing to pay for customizations that are critical to their organization.

Another consideration is value. Customers may be getting more features/functions (value) out of the Nonprofit Cloud than they would be getting in NPSP. And customers continue to benefit from the Power of Us Program which provides 10 Nonprofit Cloud – Enterprise Edition Licenses for free.

It’s also important to keep in mind that NPSP has been around long enough that there are many established approaches around implementing it. Over time, similar best practices will emerge with the Nonprofit Cloud, making it increasingly easier, faster, and ultimately less expensive to implement the solution.

2. The difficulty of administering the Nonprofit Cloud

Another concern is that the new Nonprofit Cloud is viable only if a nonprofit has expert in-house Salesforce support PLUS significant and ongoing partner support. Our team at Heller Consulting sees it differently.

Of course, there’s always a learning curve for any new solution. And the Nonprofit Cloud has introduced some new tools – such as Data Processing Engine and Omnistudio – to the capabilities for nonprofits, so there are even more new things for customers and partners to learn.

But customers CAN learn those new skills and tools just as they can learn them for any new technology. Also, as with any new technology, customers can make strategic decisions about how much and when they want to invest in partner support, internal staff training, and/or hiring new employees that already have the technical skills and experience needed.

3. The need for an additional extension object to make updates to the Contact/Person Account record

A somewhat technical concern is that Nonprofit Cloud does not allow direct updates to the Contact/Person Account record.

This statement is true, but this constraint exists only for the Salesforce product team, and has informed some of their decisions about the new Nonprofit Cloud’s data model. And it makes sense: Salesforce cannot reasonably add fields that are nonprofit-specific to the “hero objects” (like Contact and Account) that are used across clouds and industries. But nonprofit customers can still add fields to Contact, Account, and Person Accounts.

For example, just as NPSP has giving summary fields directly on Contact or Account records, the Nonprofit Cloud stores giving summary in an “extension object” called “Donor Gift Summary”. This approach might make some reporting requirements more difficult to accommodate, but there’s nothing preventing customers from recreating key information stored in the “Donor Gift Summary” object and populating fields directly on Contact/Account instead. The only limitation is the same as it has always been in NPSP: Salesforce caps the number of custom fields that can be added per object.

Learn more about Salesforce solutions for nonprofits

If your organization uses or is considering a move to Salesforce, there’s clearly a lot to think about. Finding the right technology fit for your organization depends on understanding your options and aligning them with your current technology investments, your organizational goals, and your long-term technology strategy.

Our team here at Heller Consulting is ready to help you determine what mix of Salesforce (or other) solutions might be the right fit for your needs. If they are the right fit, we can also help you to develop a business case and roadmap as well as implement and support the solutions. Contact us today to learn more and get started.

The post Shedding Light on Three Concerns About the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud appeared first on Heller Consulting.

YouthBuild

Salesforce NPSP implementation, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Program Management customizations

YouthBuild partners with opportunity youth to build the skillsets and mindsets that lead to lifelong learning, livelihood, and leadership. At more than 275 YouthBuild programs across the United States and around the world, students reclaim their education, gain job skills, and become leaders in their communities.

The post YouthBuild Salesforce NPSP implementation case study appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Download The Nonprofit’s Guide to Change Management for a deep dive into how to increase user adoption during technology projects.

This is where strong executive sponsorship can make a significant difference. The executive sponsor is the leader tasked with ensuring that stakeholders throughout the organization are engaged and understand:

• why the initiative is being undertaken and how the change will impact the organization
• which individuals are involved, and how they will be participating in the engagement and helping to move the organization forward
• the organizational vision and the project’s goals, and how they will impact staff and other internal and external constituents
• the benefits that will come from embracing the change

The stakeholders involved may include a variety of groups and individuals impacted by the change, from employees within the organization to external constituents, as well as individual donors, supporters, and volunteers.

According to an independent study that included nonprofits, active and engaged executive sponsorship is the leading factor for a change project’s success. Truly influential executive sponsors do more than just drum up support for a change project. They’re also instrumental in aligning organization and transformation goals, helping create consensus among diverse stakeholders, and lining up the resources necessary for the project to succeed.

Without question, the sponsor’s role can be a difficult one. There are internal pressures to deal with, as multiple priorities compete for scarce organizational resources, capacity, funding, and focus. In addition to championing the change project and being involved on an ongoing basis, they need to go beyond merely talking about the project to actually modeling good change behavior. Adding to the challenge, of course, the sponsoring executive also has a day job and other projects to support. With all of these dynamics at play, it’s no wonder that executive sponsors can stumble, creating roadblocks to change and jeopardizing the chances for successful transformation.

For more on executive sponsorship, download our free guide: The Secret Weapon of Nonprofit Technology Transformation 

A Case in Point

To illustrate the significant impact that executive sponsorship can provide, consider the case of a nonprofit healthcare organization that was recently consolidating databases and fundraising activities across multiple locations and facilities. For the first time, separate affiliates would be integrating business processes, creating some resistance among impacted individuals.

The organization selected a top-level executive who was involved and visible throughout the change project. Supported by an executive coach, they identified and overcame potential sources of resistance and drove adoption. The executive led the way in creating an environment focused on partnership, trust, and collaboration, and in developing a clear vision of the transformation and its impact. In addition, the executive was involved in project kick-off events at each affiliate to gain buy-in and ensure consistent targeted messaging.

With the executive sponsor’s support, the project team enabled key stakeholders to test-drive the new system, turning them into project advocates. Last but not least, the executive sponsor helped facilitate leadership meetings to communicate the project’s features and benefits and maintain momentum. The change project was a success, consolidating and streamlining fundraising functions and leveraging the capabilities of leaders across the organization.

Conclusion

When an organization is working to transform a fundamental aspect of its technology, it is by definition a high-stakes endeavor. However, by recruiting and supporting an effective executive sponsor, the organization can ensure greater buy-in and even enthusiasm for the project — and as a result, greatly increase its likelihood of success.

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The post The Importance of Executive Sponsorship in Nonprofit Projects appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Read about other challenges that come up in technology projects and how to minimize them in our free resource: Project Communication Plan for Technology Change

The productivity dip looks like this in action: An organization implements a new CRM system to centralize its data and allow for better management and reporting on its constituents, activities, and performance. Participation in user acceptance testing is decent, though a couple of key people bow out. Many issues are caught and addressed, and staff members try their best to picture the new ways that processes will work. Then the system is launched and the old system is shut down. People log in and look around and can’t remember how to do even the most basic of tasks. They find training documentation and step through the things they need to do, sometimes beckoning the person next to them to help. At the end of day one, they find they accomplished about a third of what they would have on a typical day prior to the launch. It feels shocking.

In the weeks and months that follow, many staff members have days like this as they build the muscle memory for working in the new system. The reality is that an organization simply cannot get the same amount of work done while employees are learning how to use a new system for their work.

Read how the Canadian Cancer Society trained their staff to use new technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most organizations don’t plan appropriately for the inevitable productivity dip. Not factoring in the time required to re-learn and re-establish processes means failing to accomplish some of what was planned. Or employees try to cram it all in and produce lower-quality work. If any of these factors are visible to external constituents, these issues can result in missed fundraising or mission delivery goals, and the project immediately seems like a waste.

A productivity dip is inevitable but employing formal change management techniques that engage end users throughout your implementation project will help mitigate the effects.

To get started with change management, download The Nonprofit’s Guide to Change Management.

There are three things you can do that particularly help keep the productivity dip shorter and less severe:

1. Measure & Manage User Adoption

Users should know what is expected of them before system launch and that adoption metrics will be captured and reviewed by management. Establish reports on appropriate and meaningful metrics that show which individuals are embracing the new system and which may be struggling to adapt. Continue looking at reports and inform end users that reports are being reviewed. Direct supervisors should include discussion of these metrics in one-on-one and/or team meetings as appropriate. (We outline how supervisors can communicate this in detail. Download Project Communication Plan for Technology Change to learn more.) People who are resisting or self-conscious about learning new tools will rarely self-identify for help; most will try to work around the problem. For this reason, it is important for managers to be looking out for them and finding out what types of support they need if they are struggling.

2. Plan for Temporary Staffing

To help offset the time spent learning new things, many organizations hire temporary staff. For a variety of legitimate reasons, integrations are often developed after the initial launch of a CRM system. Temporary help with data entry can ensure that other staff members have room to focus on learning and refining new business processes.

3. Reprioritize Organizational Goals for the First Year on the New System

This one is a tough sell to many nonprofits, but we feel we would be remiss not to mention that another way to deal with the inevitable productivity gap is to temporarily reduce your productivity goals. Most organizations (including ours!) have at least a few things they do year after year because they’ve “always done them” or feel a particular constituency depends on it. However, this is an opportunity to let go of efforts that are growing stale or not yielding the return they once did. You may find that some of these activities never need to return and create space to add fresh initiatives in the future. If you communicate your intentions to constituents and funders ahead of time and convey clearly that you are making a short-term time investment needed to improve your infrastructure for better long-terms results, you will earn respect from your supporters.

When people understand that there will be a productivity dip and they are expected to learn and use the new system, they will incorporate the new tools into their work more quickly. The faster each individual adapts, the shorter the productivity dip will be for the organization as a whole.

For more on this topic, download our FREE guide: Project Communication Plan for Technology Change

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The post 3 Ways to Minimize a Productivity Dip appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Instead of internal systems showing the many ways people connect with the food bank, employees often find out from the constituents themselves. This is frustrating for both the constituents and the food bank team. More than ever, nonprofit supporters and clients expect to be known. They expect that when an organization sends them an annual appeal request, it is doing so with a full understanding of giving history, past volunteer hours and gala attendance over the years.

That is all much easier said than done.

But it is possible.

Get started now: Read about our TeamHeller Accelerators for Food Banks

Our client hired us to assess the technology environment and make recommendations for areas they could consolidate and break down the information and departmental silos that had grown unwieldy over time. Here is what the environment looked like at the beginning of our project:

Food banks are incredibly resourceful organizations. The work it takes to fulfill their missions of ending hunger typically involves a great deal of complex relationship and logistical management. Because they usually carry out their work on very thin budgets, what they accomplish is remarkable.

For those reasons, it is not surprising to see food banks end up with a dizzying web of systems and data flow. Often the tools were customized at various points in the past to meet specific needs. Over time, as needs expand and evolve, tweaks are made here and there to keep things running department by department, but the overall picture starts to get muddy.

User Story Collection

We reviewed an extensive set of sample reports, spreadsheets and business process documentation provided by our client before meeting with members of departments from across the organization. During a three-day onsite, we discussed what was working and what wasn’t with representatives from Volunteer Services, Development, DevOps, Finance, Programs & Services, Marketing, Food Resources, and Community Engagement. With the information they shared, we wrote over 200 detailed user stories that articulated what was needed for people to more effectively do their jobs. These serve as functional requirements for new solutions and become the basis of user testing in the future.

We also described each system in a table, detailing its purpose, who it was used by and the nature of all data input and outputs:

As is often the case with Roadmap projects, the Discovery process of gathering this detail was useful even before recommendations were made and a plan was completed. Input from all departments allowed staff members to realize how siloed their activities had become and see new opportunities for collaboration that would better serve their constituents.

Read another case study featuring our work with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley!

Solution Selection

Based on the key issues and the user stories, we identified six fundamental requirements of a new centralized CRM system. At the highest level, this food bank required a solution or set of solutions that:

• Offered a unified view of all constituent detail and interactions with the food bank
• Included a flexible security structure, allowing a variety of roles and permissions for users with different levels of responsibility
• Had a user-friendly report interface for basic and general-use reporting
• Allowed for streamlined integrations with peripheral systems
• Had the capacity to scale and grow with the organization
• Reduced the number of different systems that needed to be supported

We then led an in-depth comparison of three platform offerings that had the potential for meeting the core requirements:  Blackbaud, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com.

While some organizations find great success utilizing Blackbaud products for fundraising and an additional tool for volunteer management, this food bank placed a high priority on streamlining its administrative overhead from an IT perspective. Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com both offer the ability to develop a wide range of functions, but ultimately they felt that Salesforce.com offered the best balance of proven pre-built apps and customizability.

With Salesforce as the primary platform, we were able to suggest the following as their target environment:

Change Management Planning

The recommended changes are significant and will dramatically impact the food bank’s ability to meet constituents’ expectations and needs. To ensure that the transition succeeds, and that the organization is able to maximize its investment, we made several important recommendations:

• Phase the Implementations – While it can be tempting to try changing all systems over at once, it rarely works. We recommended a multi-year, five-phase approach and prioritized the systems that most inhibit the organization’s ability to do good work today. In their case, the first priority is volunteer management, so that is the first system they are rolling out on the new Salesforce.com-based environment.
• But Don’t Lose Momentum – We produced a high-level project plan that allows for each phase to layer in both an achievable implementation and planning for the next phase so that momentum doesn’t wane.
• Proactively Manage the Transition – This project is going to impact almost every employee of the food bank and the ultimate goal is not to change systems, but to improve the way they work with each other and with their community. This requires thoughtful, professional change management techniques that ensure engaged employees and successful transformation. We produced a detailed plan recommending custom change management approaches based on their staff and goals.

Moving Forward

Detailed user stories showed the functional requirements. A targeted end-state diagram and phasing schedule captured the details of what the food bank expects to have after implementation is complete. Finally, a custom change management plan ensures that all stakeholders are heard, understood, and coached along the way as their jobs evolve with the project.

We created a guide just for food banks like yours. Download free today!

The problems facing food banks are complex and when looking at spreadsheets, fundraising systems, financial data and more, the idea of shifting everything over to a new system can seem overwhelming. Before jumping into an implementation, Heller Consulting has found that a comprehensive CRM Roadmap provides assurance that the project will proceed in a prudent and well-planned way.

The post CRM Roadmap to Transform a Food Bank appeared first on Heller Consulting.

That’s just one of the drivers behind the Salesforce Lightning Experience. Lightning is a significant improvement over the old user interface (UI) with a much more intuitive look and feel. The Lightning interface also includes features that even non-technical users of Salesforce can use to perform many work tasks much more easily.

Beginning in October 2019, Salesforce will start gently pushing users into the “Lightning Experience” (while the previous version will be referred to as “Salesforce Classic.”) Currently, Salesforce users’ default view of their data is Salesforce Classic. But in a few months, that will change — somewhat. For users with standard profiles (such as System Admins) and users who are assigned “Lightning User” profiles, their default view will be the new Lightning UI.

Fortunately, users whose profiles are marked “Lightning User” will be able to quickly toggle back-and-forth between the new and old UIs. The assumption is that moving forward, Salesforce will focus most of its updates on the Lightning UI, so it’s possible many users will find it increasingly cumbersome to use the Classic interface.

In this post, we’ll share some thoughts about the Salesforce Lightning Experience, including the benefits of upgrading to Lightning for users and Admins alike, and also some tips on making the transition.

What else is new?

Lightning represents not only an upgrade to the Salesforce UI, but also enables Admins to do more on their own — even if they have no coding skills.

For example, in Salesforce Classic, Admins could use the Quick Actions tool to streamline certain tasks — like updating one record with values from another record (often a great timesaver for nonprofit development and program professionals). They could also create buttons to automate specific functions — like autofilling fields in brand-new records. But to get these functionalities, they would generally need the help of coders, requiring extra time and effort. By using the Custom Actions feature (which was available in Classic, but is easier to find and use in Lightning), an Admin can quickly create functionality without the code by using a more intuitive UI.

In addition, Lightning features a variety of improved functionalities. For example, Lightning’s Kanban view presents a visual summary of a selection of many records at once. Lightning provides the user with a Kanban grid that allows them to update the status of multiple records with simple drag-and-drop controls. Lightning also fixes a frustrating limitation of Classic. It used to be very difficult to change the default view on certain Salesforce Classic screens, meaning that the user would always have to navigate through information they didn’t need before getting to what they wanted.

With Lightning, in contrast, it’s easy to create highly customized pages that bring together more data across Objects and also highlight specific data for users where they most need it — at the top of the screen. This means that if you have three List Views and a flow that are critical to a workflow, an Admin can now create an app and then drag and drop those critical items all into one page — a change which before would have required multiple clicks between tabs, or totally custom-coded Visualforce page (the custom screen developers used in Salesforce Classic). In fact, there are actually too many useful features in Lightning to list them all here!

Migration insights

From the Admin’s point of view, migrating to Lightning can be fairly straightforward. The key is to first take some time to evaluate your business processes, and understand how your users want their data displayed in order to take advantage of the great features only available in Lightning. It also includes a migration assistant that provides a “Lightning Readiness Report” that lists which Visualforce pages, custom components and code need to be updated, along with estimates of the amount of time required for doing so.

There are some tools in Classic that will no longer function in Lightning, so you may need to rework certain business processes. That said, even if the Classic tools do work, it’s very likely that many of your business processes can (and should) be reworked in Lightning to make them more efficient and easier to administer. If you are going to migrate, you should migrate with a good plan, so that you are taking full advantage of the improvements in Lightning.

The Admin also needs to know that while Lightning may eventually become the preferred UI for most users, there will be a transition period in which long-time Classic users may feel a little lost, as their go-to buttons will have disappeared. (For a more granular list of Salesforce features that are either unavailable or behave differently in the Lightning UI, click here).

Depending on the number and complexity of the Salesforce instances in your organization, you might have hundreds of objects and users. As a result, in more complex Salesforce environments, there may be a significant amount of planning and hands-on training that needs to be done.

Compelling reasons to upgrade

The good news is that the Salesforce Lightning Experience is a far more intuitive and efficient interface that your user-base will appreciate. Users may have some initial hesitation at first, but our sense is once they start using it, very few will want to go back.

Nonprofits that are invested in Salesforce can help their users by being proactive about the transition. There may be substantial work to do while transitioning from the old to the new, and many organizations can benefit from working with an organization experienced in the process. It would also be beneficial to utilize proven change management techniques to help staff through the change. By spending some time to determine how your users want to interact with Lightning, and which elements in their Classic instances need to be updated, you can begin an orderly process for upgrading the customized tools your users have come to rely on.

The post How Nonprofits Can Empower Users with the Salesforce Lightning Experience appeared first on Heller Consulting.

What’s required is reliable, accurate, and easy-to-access information to manage the nonprofit’s relationship and engagement with each constituent so that the organization can strengthen those relationships to successfully carry out its mission. To accomplish this, many nonprofits focus on the technology needed to create a constituent relationship management (CRM) ecosystem that enables them to fundraise, create awareness, mobilize volunteers, and provide support. However, a nonprofit strategy that focuses first on the technology is often not the answer. Instead, it’s crucial to prioritize people first.

Successfully accomplishing that requires engaging with all the internal stakeholders to better understand their requirements and preferences. How, when, and where they access information can have a significant impact on the structure and deployment of the CRM platform. Making CRM accessible in preferred channels is a benefit for most users. A CRM system that accommodates how and where users work will improve both the user experience and productivity.

However, creating or improving a CRM system requires managing change and thinking through how stakeholders and constituents will interpret the change. Everyone’s journey through a project  is different. By putting people first as you implement your CRM nonprofit strategy, you can anticipate their wants and needs and minimize any bumps in the road.

Minimizing resistance

Resistance is an inevitable part of any change. This is arguably the biggest threat, so it’s essential to identify and address resistance to the changes being implemented. Resentment and  fear can make it difficult to align individual perspectives with the best interests of your organization. Even the most loyal staffer in your organization can show resistance to change.

In our experience, most resistance is the result of failure to make stakeholders part of the change process. Getting them involved and making sure their concerns and suggestions are heard is the ideal way to eliminate resistance and ensure better acceptance.

Identifying who will be impacted by the change and in what ways enables you to prepare messaging specifically to address any issues around those impacts. The earlier you reach out and begin managing expectations through effective communications, the better prepared stakeholders will be.

To ensure you engage stakeholders most effectively, it’s important to consider the following questions:

• Why are we changing?
• What are the consequences of not changing?
• What sort of changes are we anticipating?
• Who are the changes impacting?
• How will we manage those changes to minimize negative effects?

Change should not be viewed as a static end state – “Things were this way, then we changed them, and now they are this other way.” Instead, active change management is necessary throughout a CRM implementation project: pre-project, in the middle, at launch, and post-implementation. That’s why it’s important to recognize this dynamic state of change, have a process in place to communicate clearly throughout the transition, and be prepared to take corrective actions as changes occur and results are monitored.

Good communication is the key

The importance of effective communications as part of a project cannot be overestimated. If your organization clearly communicates why change needs to be made, what change really involves, and what the various constituents stand to gain from cooperating, your chances for success will increase exponentially. If you ensure that communications are handled well and occur throughout the entire transition, then people are going to be far more cooperative and receptive to change.

In the end, any changes you’re considering in your nonprofit strategy are more about people than they are about processes or technology. When you make the effort to understand the people using the system, consistently communicate with them, and provide complete transparency during transformation, you’re substantially improving the chances of adoption and success.

If you put people first in your nonprofit strategy and base everything else on their input and ideas, you’ll be well on the road to successfully implementing change for the better in your organization.

The post Does Your Nonprofit Strategy Put People First? appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Change Management is the fundamental task of preparing and supporting the people in your organization for accepting new ways of doing things. In more technical terms, it is the use of targeted strategy and tools to enable organizations to transition through technology and operation planning and implementation. To do this successfully takes the input and cooperation of a lot of people inside and outside your organization. It’s crucial to get all stakeholders, decision-makers, and users in on the discussions.

Now, while it may appear to be more efficient to keep the process relatively limited, keeping tight reins on CRM implementation input may come back to bite you. By including everyone affected by CRM decisions in the planning process you’re able to develop a more accurate picture of what’s needed from your CRM system; gain insight into potential challenges; and be able to make better, more informed decisions about its functionality, capabilities, ease-of-use, and value.

Download our FREE guide: Understanding CRM for Nonprofits

Introduce everyone to the system and the changes it brings

Introducing people to the system early on helps support implementation – those individuals using the system as well as those being helped by it. Stakeholders should receive information about how the system can function, what decisions they’ll be asked to make, and their role during implementation. This enables them to be better participants in the process, and it more effectively gains their “buy-in” – creating the feeling that this is “their CRM,” and not something being forced upon them.

The evolution of technology has created an exponentially greater need for technical  skills, so part of the change process may include developing new  skill sets within your current staff or hiring new employees who already possess them. All technology decisions are now strategic, requiring someone on staff with extensive  knowledge and experience to effectively manage and maintain this new, integrated CRM technology as well as manage a growing number of  vendors. To avoid a less-than-optimal implementation and user backlash, it’s important to keep your workforce in mind and introduce new CRM policies and technologies at an appropriate pace.

Change is good. A lot of change may not be better.

If some aspect of your CRM implementation isn’t working as well as it should be, you might feel pressured to implement significant changes quickly in a well-intentioned effort to address poor performance and reduce the risk of increased inefficiencies. The problem with this is that too many changes all at once can have a negative impact on your employees’ productivity and constituent relationships.

Every nonprofit has its own unique challenges and even the best laid CRM strategy and implementation plans can hit some bumps somewhere along the line. Accept this fact and be willing to reevaluate your approach if it becomes apparent that something isn’t working as well as it could be. Remember, knowing what is ineffective is as valuable as knowing what is effective, so embrace every opportunity to identify weaknesses in your system and be willing to correct them along the way.

The evolution of CRM has led many nonprofit organizations to create new “people infrastructures” underpinning the overall ecosystem. As CRM has become increasingly sophisticated and complex it is now requiring a blend of strategic “thinkers” and tactical “doers” to visualize and build more robust and flexible IT environments.

However, it’s important to remember that the technology by itself is incapable of helping your organization reach its goals and achieve its mission. But when combined with a detailed-yet-flexible business strategy, CRM can help you prioritize people. It may take time, effort, and several cycles of adjustments. But if you make it a point to develop the right strategy and embrace comprehensive change management, you’ll find that CRM has the potential to add value to your relationships with those who serve and are served by your organization.

For more on this topic, download our free guide: Understanding CRM for Nonprofits. 

The post Managing Change for Successful CRM Implementation appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Many of these efforts are fruitful and effective, and for some organizations, an end goal of operating every area from one single-platform solution is a good goal. But here’s what’s different now: organizations are no longer assuming that the best end-state for everyone should be one CRM solution across every department in an organization.

The single CRM myth is being challenged, and we think it’s a good thing.

So let’s back up: CRM is Constituent Relationship Management, and organizations have long understood that the vision and strategy for CRM are best established at an institution-wide level. We’ve all been talking for decades about deepening and personalizing the interactions with constituents, and those relationships often cross departmental boundaries.

When it comes to supporting the CRM vision with technology, the landscape for nonprofit CRM software has changed quite a bit in the last two decades. Many software vendors worked to create CRM platforms which they hoped would provide nonprofits with one central system able to support many, or all, imaginable constituent management business functions.

Membership, advocacy, online community, annual fund, major giving, special events, peer-to-peer events, education, volunteering, retail point-of-sale, and many other areas of activity were often asked to function out of one central CRM, because that was assumed to be the best strategy.

And it is the best for some organizations. We’ve seen, and helped with, some amazing successes for supporting an organizations’ CRM vision with a centralized, single nonprofit CRM.

But sometimes that single solution is too narrow to accommodate the realities of all departments’ needs. And advances in deep, robust functionality for some niche point solutions have made the landscape rich with options.

We are now hearing a shift in the conversation. Organizations are moving past the single CRM myth of one-size-fits-all approach, and are carefully considering the unique characteristics of each of their departments. Each organization is crafting a tailored approach to determining which business functions belong in which system, and developing nuanced and dynamic technology plans to support the CRM vision

Every nonprofit lives somewhere along a spectrum – one organization might do well with an ecosystem built substantially from one major CRM platform with maybe a couple of single point solutions added to fill in critical gaps. Another might require an ecosystem built entirely with a variety of parts taken from various independent solutions. Every nonprofit that utilizes this approach must think about where they need to live on that spectrum and how they must build their ecosystem to successfully accomplish their mission as efficiently as possible.

By embracing this solution spectrum, nonprofits can create a much more nimble, flexible, and organic CRM ecosystem. Instead of a one-size-fits-all, single-solution platform, a nuanced, multi-component ecosystem enables a nonprofit to manage it continuously, making much smaller and more frequent revisions. This maximizes efficiency and performance without the disruption of a major upgrade that grinds everything to a halt, demoralizes stakeholders, and potentially compromises the ability to carry out the mission.

Looking for more about CRM? Download our FREE Guide: Understanding CRM for Nonprofits

Matching function to framework

This more effective CRM strategy requires nonprofits to take a closer look at the functions they need to perform and the software ecosystem that already exists. They may already possess multiple nonprofit CRM systems that claim to have the necessary capabilities, they’re just not being effectively utilized. The question then becomes not “what replacement technology do we need?”, but “how do we distribute these desired functions to the software currently in our ecosystem that can most efficiently perform them?”

Let’s be clear: this is a more nuanced approach that requires internal analysis, a clearly-defined CRM strategy, and a willingness to manage frequent change. But the payoff can be huge – better utilization of existing software, less stakeholder resistance, greater adoption, more system flexibility, and less disruptive change.

Yes, in the end, the single solution may actually be the answer for your organization. But it’s not the only answer. It’s important to understand that there are options and the multi-point, flexible ecosystem outlined here could be the best option for you. is perhaps the most attractive.

The post Debunking the Single CRM Myth appeared first on Heller Consulting.

To successfully accomplish that, most nonprofits employ constituent relationship management (CRM) strategies, creating an engagement ecosystem built around people, processes, and technology. In the early days of CRM implementation, the challenges were, in large part, technological. As with any application and industry, nascent CRM software development had its share of issues and shortcomings to be worked out – and, over the years, they pretty much were.

Today, the challenges of CRM are less about the technology and more about the people using it and benefiting from it. And while technological issues remain, they have increasingly taken a backseat to people challenges such as departmental resistance, user acceptance, proper training, and effective change management. All of these concerns are being impacted by changing constituent demands and the need to coordinate efforts internally to effectively manage a lot of moving organizational parts.

Still, there are some fundamental challenges that have not changed, including unrealistic expectations about what CRM can do, what business processes need to be included in the CRM ecosystem, data transparency and accessibility issues, and the need for ongoing training. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

What has changed significantly in recent years are trends in nonprofit accountability and impact measurement, evolving operational priorities and user preferences, and increasing technological options. A new set of complex external pressures have come into play for many nonprofits, creating new challenges for organizations and the technologies they utilize while driving changes in their operations.

One of the greatest changes in the challenges of CRM has been an increased focus on what’s now known as “impact” – the ability of a nonprofit to accomplish something meaningful and substantial with its donations. Do they spend more on the organization itself than on doing good? In recent years, funders have sharpened the focus on impact when selecting organizations to support – how effective are they in carrying out their missions?

This new focus on impact has also affected how constituents engage with the nonprofits they support. Donors, volunteers, and clients have higher expectations of personalized engagement than ever before. They want organizations to demonstrate that they are fully aware of all the ways in which their constituents have interacted with them and actively acknowledge their engagement and contributions to the nonprofit. All of this is having a profound effect on how nonprofits implement and organize their CRM ecosystems and how well they manage the changes they incur.

There is no question that today’s technology in general is better than it was a decade ago. The challenges of CRM today are primarily people-centric. How nonprofits seamlessly integrate their improved technology with the people and processes that interact with it is critical to how successful the nonprofit will be.

For more on this topic, download our guide Understanding CRM for Nonprofits.

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When the only constant element of our political and economic environment is its daily instability, it can be difficult guide your nonprofit with confidence. You can’t always predict what will happen next month (or even next week), but there are some steps you can take to begin ensuring the stability of your organization.

By assessing and optimizing your fundraising strategy, you can increase your organization’s endurance and adaptability in uncertain times.

That is, a strong and adaptive internal process for fundraising strategy is the ultimate safeguard against a rocky environment.

Read through these tips for bolstering your organization’s fundraising strategy and consider the ways that you could incorporate them into your existing methods and protocols:

1. Take a look at your current fundraising program.
2. Find the right consultant for your fundraising strategy.
3. Identify areas of growth to target in your fundraising strategy.
4. Research your fundraising software options.
5. Implement a strong stewardship strategy.

Smart organizations know that refining their fundraising strategies is a continuous job.

Take the opportunity to read through these tips and refresh your perspective on the most important part of your nonprofit’s operations: its fundraising strategy.

No matter if you’re planning a major capital campaign or an annual fund drive, it’s crucial that you never treat fundraising strategy as a one-and-done task.

This doesn’t mean that you need to start from scratch every time you begin a new project, though. Use your current fundraising program as a starting point!

Among other things, a strategic assessment of your current fundraising strategy should identify:

• Your organization’s most important stakeholders
• The state of your internal fundraising structure and culture
• Your rates of fundraising success and failure
• Key fundraising metrics central to the success of your nonprofit
• Your processes for feedback and improvement

A fundraising consultant can help you to assess every element of your existing fundraising strategy and identify areas that need improvement.

This information will be invaluable after you’ve identified your exact goals and begin to plan your new strategy. Understanding the areas in which you historically come up short and where you typically succeed is essential to crafting a strategic vision for future growth.

Perhaps your consultant will reach the conclusion that you’re short-staffed, for example. Periods of change can be an excellent time to invite a fresh perspective into the mix. Check out Aly Sterling’s list of the best nonprofit job boards to find candidates with the critical fundraising skills that you’ve discovered your organization is missing.

External guidance is extremely helpful at this early stage of the fundraising strategy process since it’s often rather difficult to pinpoint our own weak spots. This, however, is the just first step to designing a more adaptable and achievable plan of action.

Professional nonprofit fundraising consultants are trained to craft effective and streamlined fundraising strategies. Whether you’re looking to enact changes large or small, you’ll most likely want some outside help.

Do your research and discuss your options with your board of directors. Find a consultant with experience helping a diverse clientele; this will ensure a more flexible fundraising solution.

Next, identify the fundraising consultation services that will be most helpful in revamping your strategy. An ideal fundraising consulting firm will offer one or more of the following services:

• Campaign planning. A fundraising consultant will help you plan fundraising campaigns that that align with your goals.
• Technology consulting. Finding the best new CRMs or database systems and incorporating them into your fundraising strategy can be difficult without some help.
• Nonprofit leadership training. A nonprofit consultant can help your staff and board remain up-to-speed and engaged with developments in the nonprofit world.
• Feasibility studies. Your consultant can conduct a feasibility study before your next campaign and prescribe next steps to take to prepare for the campaign you envision.

Nonprofit feasibility studies, in particular, are an essential part of any major campaign or fundraising program. By revealing your fundraising weaknesses, they’ll identify your performance metrics that need the most attention and help your team address these issues throughout your broader fundraising strategy.

After assessing your past strategies, realistically identifying your new goals, and finding appropriate external guidance, it’s crucial that you find the specific areas of growth that your new fundraising strategy must target.

Remember, an effective fundraising strategy update will help you maintain your donation revenue, but a great fundraising strategy will grow your overall capacity.

You and your fundraising consultant can plan for growth by plotting out the specific areas that need improvement. Depending on your organization’s past fundraising performance, these might include:

• Your overall returns on fundraising investments
• Your rates of donor engagement, segmented by type
• Your rates of donor and prospect growth

With expert guidance, you can then diagnose why your organization failed in these areas. Too few prospects? An uncompelling mission or uninspiring project? Were your goals simply too ambitious?

For example, say your rates of digital donor engagement are distressingly low. Your fundraising consultant will recognize this problem area and identify the missing technologies that will boost this key metric when incorporated into your new fundraising strategy.

Updating your fundraising strategy presents a great opportunity to incorporate new fundraising software into your campaigns and operations.

Look over key metrics that you’ve identified as growth targets. Chances are an effective fundraising software solution exists to address each one of them.

If your organization has been overdue for a technology update anyway, now’s the time to consider how some new software might not only streamline your operations but also provide a boost to your donor engagement and fundraising revenue.

Fundraising software can optimize any aspect of your fundraising strategy, including:

• Prospect identification and development. Databases of wealth markers, giving history, and political contributions are invaluable for finding major prospects. Prospect generator tools make it easy to quickly identify and target proven donors.
• Digital marketing tools. Strong donor engagement relies more than ever on your web presence, so take the guesswork out of your digital marketing and cover all your bases with customized automated campaigns.
• Donor management. An effective CRM will compile and organize all your important donor data, providing the analytic reporting you need to make strategic decisions and ensure your fundraising efforts hit the targets you’ve identified.
• Optimized donation pages. Providing a cleanly-designed donation page will vastly improve your donors’ user experience of your site, creating a positive impression and building a stronger relationship.

Most importantly, any up-to-date fundraising software that you choose to incorporate into your new strategy should integrate with your other digital tools.

This kind of software integration enables you to create your own custom suite of fundraising software solutions that you can continually adapt to best suit your strategies. For instance, check out this list of the best SalesForce apps for nonprofits from Double the Donation.

This final fundraising strategy tip is too often overlooked by nonprofits looking to reach their goals quickly, but effective stewardship is the key to organically growing your base of support for the long term.

Have your fundraising consultant help you to identify the areas where your stewardship strategies have failed in the past. Do you have poor donor retention rates? Do very few of your donors upgrade into a higher giving range? Do you rely too heavily on single type of donor?

Donor stewardship is essential to maintaining any growth that you achieve, so it should be considered an integral part of your fundraising strategy and not an afterthought.

Your fundraising consultant should identify the kind of donor relationship metrics that your new strategy should prioritize. These include donor acquisition and retention as well as donor upgrade rates. If your organization features a membership program, your membership software should easily provide you with these metrics.

It’s important that once you identify the aspects of stewardship with which your organization struggles, you actively incorporate some plans to address them in your fundraising strategy. For instance:

• If you have low acquisition, work with your consultant to write a clear case for support when approaching new prospects. Communication and transparency will build trust.
• If you have low donor retention, think of specific ways to engage donors with your current campaigns. Keeping them involved will keep them thinking of you.
• If few of your donors upgrade, be sure to create individual stewardship plans for your major donors and communicate with them personally through their preferred channels.

Look over your entire fundraising strategy and identify some specific ways to cultivate your donor relations for each campaign on your calendar.

By planning ahead and making stewardship an integral part of your fundraising strategy, your growth will be truly sustainable, easing the stresses and stakes of your future fundraising projects.

Political and economic pressures might present significant fundraising challenges for nonprofits of all sizes, but the easiest way to safeguard your organization’s stability is to design and implement a strong fundraising strategy.

By planning ahead, continually improving your techniques, and seeking outside help, you can adapt your fundraising strategies to any new goals or external challenges that come your way!

This is a guest post by Aly Sterling, Founder and President of Aly Sterling Philanthropy .

Aly Sterling is an accomplished speaker, active board member and proud leader of Aly Sterling Philanthropy, a national consulting firm based in the Midwest. Her expertise includes fundraising, strategic planning, search consultation and board leadership development for organizations of varying sizes and capacities. Read more about Aly here.

The post 5 Essential Tips for Crafting an Expert Fundraising Strategy appeared first on Heller Consulting.

Worst Case Study

We were recently contacted by an organization that realized they were in this exact situation. They had attempted to implement Salesforce as their new CRM system and several months past their launch date, the system was a mess and staff members were struggling to carry out every day tasks. Small errors and issues had compounded into large problems that resulted in bad mailing lists, incorrect financial reporting and constant user frustration.

Almost every system conversion has some data loss because some legacy data is too inconsistent to migrate cleanly to the new one. However, those instances should always be known and documented during the conversion process, with clear options offered for manual entry or archiving. If data discrepancy errors begin to arise after launch that were not accounted for during conversion, it can undermine trust very quickly. Users naturally begin to ask, “If this is wrong, what else is wrong that I haven’t encountered yet?” In this case, as issues surfaced, people became unable to move forward without fear of communicating incorrect information to their leadership and their supporters.

They reached out to us for help assessing their situation and determining the best path to a sustainable solution. Our interview and data analysis process revealed the challenging state they were in and several of the complications they were facing:

• They had never gotten full benefit from their legacy system because it didn’t fit their organization’s needs very well. With the new system imploding, they now had low confidence any system would serve them well.
• Over years of struggling with a not-quite-right system, the team had cobbled together inconsistent business processes with many undocumented work-arounds and shortcuts.
• Some key tasks were overlooked during the project design phase and as a result they had to maintain data in both systems until Salesforce could be further configured.
• The data from the legacy system was not migrated effectively to the new system, resulting in errors and inconsistencies.
• Because Salesforce was new to them, staff members understandably struggled to distinguish whether issues were a matter of system limitations or training needs.
• Individuals and teams were desperately trying to solve the issues, but there was no central oversight or guidance to make sure efforts were aligned.
• Without confidence in the base data, they were not certain of the accuracy of the reports and dashboards produced. Because they were using both systems, it became harder as time went on to determine which was the source of truth.

Clearly, this was a difficult situation and there would be no easy answers. Starting with the information from the preliminary interviews, Heller worked with the team over several days to evaluate their technology issues, business processes, readiness to accept change, and the organization’s perception of the project. At the conclusion, we provided recommendations for how they could address their current state. Each of these basic recommendations included specific steps to address the challenges above.

• To minimize further data discrepancies, we recommended that they revert to using their legacy system until Salesforce could be re-launched in a cleaner, fully configured state. Though we tried to identify ways to avoid this drastic step, in the end, it seemed that this would get them to their desired end-state faster than trying to patch the holes and leaks.
• We also recommended that they take a step back as a team and realign their goals. They needed to develop a clear roadmap toward specific goals to be successful with representatives from all stake holding departments at the table.
• We documented the data and configuration issues affecting the Salesforce implementation and outlined the options for addressing each. Salesforce is an amazing system designed for customization through an extensive ecosystem of Apps for different functions. This allows organizations to establish a tool that really fits their needs, but it requires a level of familiarity to make good choices. It is critical to ensure that someone within each organization becomes a subject matter expert and receives training to understand how to evaluate, test and implement options over time.

While reverting to their old system was not ideal, the detailed list of issues and options gave them a framework for re-thinking their needs and goals.

It’s understandable how things can go sideways when resources are scarce, tensions are high, and the technology is creating more problems than its solving. For our client, a series of very human decisions and an underestimation of what it would take to replace a legacy system compounded into a significant problem. But the organization called in some backup, took a step back, and refocused on the goal of implementing a more efficient system that better serves their constituents. If you are in the midst of a project that feels unsteady, don’t hesitate to take a little bit of time to pause, re-evaluate and seek outside help if needed.

Contact Us

Project management industry studies reveal that more than half of project resistance could be avoided using effective change management strategies. If you feel your initiative is at risk, Heller’s certified change management specialists are skilled in identifying and reducing project resistance that arises before, during and after implementations. Since each organization, and each change initiative, is unique, Heller offers a variety of change management services to ensure your organization successfully achieves your technology vision. Our services have clearly defined deliverables tailored specifically for nonprofits, and are coordinated to match your project phases. We can join your in-progress initiative to advise and realign teams that are showing signs of resistance and increasing risk.

Learn more about the services we offer here, or contact us to learn how effective change management strategies can support your project’s success.

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