<aside> What’s this about? A customer relationship management systems (CRM) helps you manage all of your organization’s interactions with current and potential beneficiaries, collaborators, and candidates.

What do I need to do? Determine a suitable CRM given your organization’s needs and budget, and configure the system to match your organization’s preferences.

Contents

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Further reading

• Fitzroy Academy: How to choose a CRM

Databases

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What’s a CRM?

A customer relationship management system (CRM) is a software tool that helps you manage your “customer” relationships.

Customer relationship management refers to the management of all of your organization’s interactions with current and potential beneficiaries, collaborators, and candidates. It’s a key component of any marketing strategy, as well as a way to track grants are other processes.

In the context of a nonprofit, a typical CRM might offer contact management, “deal” stages (for tracking the status of potential grants or donations), task management, and analytics/reporting.

A CRM is usually needed after outgrowing initial tracking via a simpler system, like Google Sheets, and can be configured to support:

• donor management
• grant management
• partnership management for programs

and more.

Suitable CRMs for early-stage nonprofits include:

• Airtable — a flexible system that can be put to many uses
• Bloomerang for donor management
• Pipedrive — designed as a sales pipeline, but can be reconfigured

The interface for HubSpot, a common CRM.

Do you need a CRM?

CRMs are a big investment, and configuring/implementing them can be costly, time-consuming and requiring specific expertise.

As a result, many nonprofits make do without a paid CRM solution — instead relying on spreadsheets or distributed notes. This can quickly get messy, so we definitely recommend implementing some sort of lean “CRM” as quickly as possible. This may involve, for example, Google Sheets plus Zapier for automations; or free/inexpensive platforms like Airtable, Notion, or HubSpot Free.

The priority with your nonprofit’s CRM will likely be donor management to begin with.

Some common signs that you need a more robust, paid CRM platform include:

• You lose track of donors and/or collaborators: You may rely on multiple spreadsheets, with data quickly becoming outdated. You struggle to find donor interactions or contribution history, with no single source of truth for relationships (often stored across various emails or notes).
• Outreach and fundraising is inefficient: Sending donor emails and newsletters takes significant manual effort/time. Follow-ups for fundraising campaigns are inconsistent, and you don’t reliably prioritize major contributors/contributions.
• Reporting is a headache: Generating reports on donations, grant compliance, or impact requires manual work. This makes your nonprofit’s IRS Form 990 more difficult to compile.

Setting up a CRM

There are dozens of well-reviewed CRMs in the wild, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify one that suits the needs of your organization.

Here’s how we recommend you approach things:

1. Identify priority features: Not all platforms offer the same sets of features, and not all features are implemented equally well. It’s worth identifying which features are deal-breakers for your organization, and potentially ranking features by priority. When we analyze CRMs, we’re typically interested in certain features like contact management, “deal” stages (for tracking the status of potential purchases), task management, and analytics/reporting.
2. Determine budget: What’s the value of a good CRM? This will depend on your budget, team culture and working preferences, and whether you’re already using other systems that overlap with the features of the CMS. (For example, you may already be using a dedicated applicant tracking system to manage job candidates, donors, or other collaborators, which could make the value of the CMS significantly lower — as one system could be used for many purposes). A typical pricing structure for a CMS is on the order of $20 per user per month.
3. Create a comparison spreadsheet: A CRM can touch many elements of an organization, depending on whether and how it’s repurposed for non-marketing needs. This means that there are often several stakeholders in play. It’s therefore useful to present the options you’ve considered — with summaries, pros and cons, expected costs, and the presence or absence of your priority features. As you’re doing this, make sure to check out endorsements and see what users of the CRM have to say about it. Look up ratings on Capterra and Trustpilot — a score of 4.5 and above (ideally based on 100+ reviews) is a good sign. Popular platforms include Airtable, Salesforce, Zoho, and HubSpot.
4. See the platforms in action: There’s no substitute for a demo of the CRM, to get a feel for the user experience, user interface, and the actual implementation of the features you’re interested in. You might begin your investigation by checking out third-party walkthroughs on YouTube; most providers will have their own YouTube channels with first-party tutorials, but these are often less useful or impartial. As you narrow down your list of contenders, register for demos or trial accounts with the providers directly. (If you’re looking at Airtable, you can find a donor database template here, or a “sales” pipeline template here.)

• Recommended providers

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