Is CRM really right for your organisation and are you ready for it?

The benefits of customer relationship management technology have been well publicised and whether you are a business or a charity, the software can be a real life saver when it comes to keeping track of customers, clients or donors and the marketing or operational interactions we have with them.  That being said, the technology is not for everyone. Many charities abandon CRM projects before the implementation is even complete because they don’t realise the time commitment and investment required to get value from a system.

So before your charity fills out the form for free or hugely discounted software from the organisations such as Salesforce or Microsoft, ask yourselves the following questions.  They will help to determine if you need – and can benefit from -- CRM technology:

• Do you have data on donors or clients that you need to share between team members? 
• Do you have disparate data on donors or clients in multiple documents, spreadsheets or files?
• Is it easy for team members to get access to data or information from wherever they are, or do they need to physically travel to the office or rely on emails from colleague to view it?
• Do you have all of your information on the services you provide a single client in the same place, or are they listed in several databases held by individual service teams?
• Are your funders demanding reports that are difficult to produce in a short timescale?

If you answered ‘no’ to the majority of these questions, you are probably not going to see great value from a CRM system and would likely find it to be more of a burden than a benefit for your organisation. You may find formalising your processes to ensure your databases and spreadsheets are kept up-to-date and accessible to the right people are all you need to increase you organisation’s efficiency in dealing with clients and donors.

If you answered ‘yes’ to more than half of these questions, however, your charity may indeed benefit from the use of CRM technology.  Which brings us to the next step in the process – are you ready for it? This next set of questions will help you determine if your charity is ready to undertake the challenges of implementing CRM:

• How bad is your pain? Are you currently losing track of donors, receiving complaints or missing out on donations or funding?
• Do you have a senior executive committed to resolving these problems?
• Can you clearly articulate what you are trying to achieve with a CRM system?
• Do you have a clear understanding of the processes for collecting and updating your data?
• Can you identify the cost benefits of CRM for your organisation? Will it save you time and increase the accuracy of your customer interactions?
• Do you understand the benefits of CRM for the people on the ground actually carrying out the processes/updating the system?
• Do you have the technical resources (or understand the cost of acquiring them) to implement a CRM system?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all of these questions then you are well on your way toward CRM success! If you found yourself floundering or answering ‘no’ to some of the questions, you need to take a hard look at the organisation and weigh out the costs versus the benefits to determine if it’s right for your team.

I realise I’ve taken a bit of a ‘tough love’ approach to CRM, but trust me, I’ve seen charities with the best will in the world fail at the first hurdle. I’m a huge advocate of the technology and know charities – large and small -- that couldn’t function effectively without it, but it does require a change in the way of working and buy-in from all levels of the organisation to achieve this level of success.
These questions can help ensure you make the right choices about your approach to CRM.

Big In Japan

When I moved into the non-profit world, I thought I would be helping UK organisations get a bit more out of technology. I never imagined I would become a globally published writer.

Well, after a few articles on Techsoup's website and one that got republished in Brazil, I've now cracked Asia in a very small way. My friend Kazuho Tsuchiya at the Japan NPO Center, who I met through TechSoup asked me to write an article on 'How UK Non-Profits are facing up to a changed economic reality' for their magazine (a real paper publication).

If your Japanese isn't up to translating it, the English version is here.

Are charities investing enough in technology?

So sometimes other people actually publish what I write:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector-network/2013/jun/26/charities-investing-technology

The 'Amazoning' of IT

Steve Duplessie, the founder of Enterprise Strategy Group, yesterday posted this article on Computer World: IT is about to meet the Amazon Effect

The sentiment it expresses is something I have been talking about for the last couple of years, but still a lot of people don't seem to get it. The internet has transformed many industries, retailing, music, and finance being the most obvious, yet I still talk to many people who don't see that it is not just introducing some new services to IT, it is totally transforming the industry. 

While most people acknowledge that Salesforce.com, Office 365, Box and Dropbox etc. are presenting new and interesting options, what they miss is that they are cutting out whole swathes of the traditional IT industry. Critically, many of these services are cutting out the traditional IT organisation completely and selling straight to the end user.

The world of IT is being 'Amazoned' and those that don't respond will go the way of HMV and Blockbuster.

Raising morale and professionalism through technology

Some of the most fascinating insights from our recent survey on the impact of the CTX donation programmes revolved around their effect on morale and professionalism within charities. The findings in this area sparked a debate that resulted in my recent blog for the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network. I wanted to get underneath the headlines of the Guardian blog and look at why the donation of technology to a charity can have such a positive impact on staff.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents to our survey (83%) stated that the donation programmes helped them access software they would otherwise have been unable to afford. Investment in IT is notoriously low within charities (the National Computing Centre reported in 2011 that the Third Sector registered the lowest investment per employee of all the sectors they surveyed) and this has a knock on effect on staff. We have all suffered the frustrations of poor IT - PC’s not responding, connections to the internet failing, not being able to read documents sent to us electronically etc. For many charity staff, this is still a daily reality.

Our survey identified ‘more robust systems’ and reduced compatibility issues as two areas where donated technology had a major impact - addressing the basic requirements of a charity's technology infrastructure. But ‘benefits from new software features’, ‘better use of and awareness of features’, and ‘increased expectations of IT’ also featured heavily among the benefits the donations brought. So what we are seeing is a positive feedback loop where better underlying technology breeds confidence in that technology. This confidence then encourages people to use the features of the technology more and, having discovered new benefits, they are more positive about looking for ways that technology can help them. Once a positive attitude towards a charity’s technology has been engendered, staff start to expect it to help them rather than hinder them. As this feedback occurs, the users begin to be more positive about the changes technology can bring and it becomes easier to use technology to drive more ambitious improvements, particularly where a charity comes into contact with its beneficiaries and funders.

What our survey found was that taking away people’s frustration with technology increases staff morale and drives up the perception that the organisation is ‘professional’ at what it does. This is no doubt about more than the technology itself. It probably has a lot to do with how technology helps make processes more consistent and repeatable. As was pointed out in the Guardian blog, this gives people a level of confidence that they can deliver on the promises they make (or the organisation makes on their behalf). It also gives them confidence in front of fundraisers and their friends and family when they talk about what they do.

Most people buy into the ideals of their charity. They want it to succeed, they want it to deliver the results their beneficiaries are looking for. There is nothing better for a charity’s staff and volunteers than to see those successes and have the confidence that they can do it again and again. A robust technology foundation, the feeling that they are working in a 21^st century organisation, is clearly a big step in this direction.

Key considerations for cloud adoption by NGOs

In 2012, CTT, in partnership with TechSoup Global, conducted a survey of not-for-profits, charities, and social benefit organisations around the world to better understand the current state of their technology infrastructure, plus their future plans for adopting cloud technologies.


One of the findings the survey threw up was that many NGOs were unsure how to go about assessing the myriad offerings that are being labelled 'cloud'. 
In response, Techsoup asked me to right an article on the 'Key considerations for cloud adoption by NGOs.' Which you can find here.

Back in June I wrote about CTT's plans to work from home during the Olympics and I thought I would update you on the outcome. To be honest, I have struggled to know what to say. Nothing much happened. There were no crises, no panicked phone calls, no complaints from clients. The plan worked!  The indicators we use to see if everything is running smoothly carried on at their usual levels. Each morning I check how many new registrations to the CTX programme have not been progressed (this is the area that manages the charitable donation programmes of Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, and a number of other technology companies) – there are usually 3-4, during the Olympics, 3-4. Sitting at home watching the client helplines ring, something I hear in the office, it's normally answered within 2-3 rings, during the Olympics, 2-3 rings. Nothing unusual to report.

The office was visited more than we anticipated. This was mainly because some staff still came in to have meetings with clients and partners. Some things are just easier to do face to face, especially if you’ve got several people and you want to draw all over white boards and stick post-its everywhere. We weren’t sure how other, non-CTT, people were approaching the prophecies of travel chaos, so this wasn’t so surprising.

So the verdict on our experiment is that it was a resounding success. We stayed away from London (mostly) and we ran CTT just as efficiently as we do when we’re there. That’s not to say we would work like this all the time. The general human contact, getting to know your colleagues, and picking up on what’s going on that you get from being together in the office is a really important part of creating a great team and an effective organisation. But now we know everything works, we can offer our staff a level of flexibility around working practices that makes a big difference to them and helps us retain the great talent we have in the team, even when their personal circumstances change.