 Welcome to Ready, Fire, AIM, How Not to Choose a Donor Database or CRM. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. I've been with the organization for just about 7 years and prior to that spent a decade working at small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California. I was often the accidental techie who bestowed the role of having to choose technology for my small organizations without a whole lot of tech expertise. And I relied on TechSoup and experts like our presenters today to help me make those decisions. The first presenter that I'll be introducing is Robert Weiner. He's a donor management expert and an independent consultant specializing in helping fundraisers make informed, strategic decisions about information technology like CRMs or constituent relationship management systems, donor databases, association management software, email marketing software, content management systems, and more. He's consulted with a wide variety of organizations ranging from volunteer groups to UC Berkeley, colleges, universities, and organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Earth Justice. He is also one of the hosts of TechSoup's databases and software forums. So he's a longtime participant in TechSoup's community and we're grateful to have his expertise shared with us today. Also joining is Tracy Kronzak. She's a CRM implementation strategy, change management, and organizational leadership and technology adoption expert. She has more than 15 years of experience in the nonprofit sector including philanthropy, activism, research, technology management, and Salesforce CRM consulting. And she is a member of N10's community as well and has served on in an advisory capacity to the NTC and leading change conferences. She was recognized in August 2014 by the Salesforce Foundation as one of 30 community heroes for her contributions to advancement of nonprofits using Salesforce.com. We're also very happy to have her joining us. We all happen to be based in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area. Where are you? Go ahead and chat in your window to let us know where you're joining from today. I don't know how many of you are in the Bahamas but that's always where I wish I was as beautiful as it is here in the Bay Area. We have people writing in the chat window from all over the country. I can't even read them off. They're flying fast so quickly. We know that you can't see everything that's happening in the chat so if there are useful tips that are shared by other participants we'll chat those back out to you so that you can read along with us. And watch that chat box because we'll be sharing resources throughout the webinar. Looking at today's agenda we'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup. We'll have some time doing some live poll questions to understand what your experience level is. We'll do a little bit on definitions, talk through some tales of six different nonprofits and how they chose CRMs or donor databases. We'll have selection do's and don'ts, tips on how to choose, surviving implementation and beyond. Have a lot of resources to help you get started and move forward with your own projects. And then we'll talk a little bit about donations of donor management and CRM tools. We'll have time for Q&A at the end and we'll have a few opportunities throughout the webinar for that as well. So as you're moved to do so feel free to chat those questions into us. So TechSoup Global is a global network of 63 partner NGOs working in 121 countries around the world. If you want to see the impact that we've made last year our 2014 year in review is now available and it's a pretty fantastic impressive read. So this is where we are in the world serving more than 615,000 NGOs worldwide and delivering nearly $5 billion in technology products and grants for the NGO sector and greater good. I'm thrilled to be a TechSoup staff person having also been a beneficiary of the programs before I started here at TechSoup. And we deliver not only product donations through the TechSoup.org website but also try to help you as nonprofit and social good change makers improve how you reach your mission by leveraging technology. And so with that I'd like to get us started on the topic today by having some poll questions to let us know sort of where you're at in the process. Go ahead and click one of these radio buttons on the screen and if none of them apply to you chat into us in the chat box. Go ahead and comment if not. Where you're at with your current database? Are you happy? Are you looking for a new one? Are you moving currently to a new system? Or have you recently converted to a new system? Maybe other is where you're at right now. I have some people commenting and chat overwhelmed. It's too complicated. We have some folks saying that they don't have one at all. We have someone saying new office looking for a first database system. So this is great, new organizations. Hopefully today we have people yelling help. So this is what today is hopefully going to be about. We have about 145 people in the room right now and that number is going to continue to climb. So we want to make sure that everybody has a chance to participate and that we're serving the greatest majority of you with the information we share today. So this helps our presenters have a little bit more detailed understanding of where you're at. Just to show the results on screen, about 75% of you are looking for a new donor management system or CRM. So that's great to know. I also see that we have some public libraries joining us. They may have no database but they're hopefully looking to set one up. So that's great. Hopefully you'll get a lot out of today's event as well. One other question quickly, how are you currently tracking donors now? If you have a system, go ahead and chat in or click on one of these radio buttons if one of these applies to you. If there's a system that's not on here, I saw somebody mention constant contact earlier. Somebody else mentioned Sage 50 and GiftWorks and NetSuite. So go ahead and chat in. We only had a certain number of options that we could put on the screen so we can't cover all of them. See MailChimp, Campaigner, Community Pearl, Microsoft Access, QuickBooks, Church Windows, so all kinds of different things. So we have churches joining us too. Go ahead and let everybody have another few seconds to respond to this one. Since there are many of us in the room today, some people are saying they're using Salsa. I used to use Salsa myself and Convio and Constant Contact. I've used many of these myself too. So I'm going to show the results quickly on the screen. And it looks like a huge portion of the people that are using one of those donor systems currently are using Excel, which is a sad reality I know. Nothing against Excel. It's an extremely powerful tool but a donor management system it is really not. So one last question before we get you started with our presenters today. What do you see is wrong with your current system? And you can select more than one of these options. You can select as many as you want. And again you can comment in the chat if one of the options is not there. So maybe your current system doesn't let multiple people use it and access it. And that's a big problem. That's not on this list because we ran out of space. But maybe you're happy with your system. So if you're one of those people that were in the very small percentage of that first poll question, then maybe there is no need to change. So let's see, we've got lots of people responding here. Some people are saying the space in reporting is too long, does not track grants longitudinally. It's a big word for a Thursday morning for me. Board members want to know who's being contacted and what happened, and they're not trackable. So this is great. I'm going to show the results here in just a second. And we are reading all of those comments in the back end. We know like I said that you can't all see each other's comments, but where there are useful resources shared we'll be sure to put them back out to you. And the biggest issues are almost 60%, or now 60%, can't track all of our data, can't get all the reports that we need followed by can't target appeals and mailings. Those are big issues. And we have a little more than 155 people on the line right now. And with that I'd like to go ahead and invite our presenters to join us and talk to us about how not to choose a donor database or CRM. And in that you'll probably learn some tips on how to do it the right way. So thanks so much for joining us today. We're so glad to have you, Robert and Tracy. Thank you Becky. We're thrilled to be here. And the title I put the word not in parentheses because we are going to talk about how not to, as well as how to choose a donor database or constituent relationship management system, which is becoming the current buzzword, buzzphrase for this type of system. But I still think of it primarily around donor management, member management, relationship management. And this is where we're going today. We're going to talk about dos and don'ts through this process. And then we're going to talk about what happens after you've signed on the dotted line. You've made your choice. You're ready to move ahead. The project doesn't simply end when you pick your new system. You've got to survive the implementation project and then manage the system going forward. And we'll have time throughout the presentation for questions and answers. This is not a tech talk. We will do our best to avoid jargon except for CRM, which I've already explained. And we are not going to talk about specific products. If you have questions about how do I do this in my current database, we're not going to be able to answer those sorts of things for you. This is going to be general introduction to the topic of how to move through this and survive this kind of project. And with that, Tracy is going to talk about what CRM is and why that's taking over our world as a buzzphrase. Thank you, Robert. And if you all can't hear me, just let me know in the chat line. To Robert's point a moment ago about jargon, I think actually if I had to redo this slide, I would say there's a lot of jargon out there. And I'll try and break this down and something that makes sense because through the past few years, the lines have really been blurring between what people call CRMs, which is an acronym for Constituent Relationship Management and Plinal Databases, things that you've been accustomed to for years, like Razor Damage, and Access, and FileMaker Pro. But also too, there's even more jargon and marketing entering the sector right now when it comes to content management systems. And what we're seeing is these are all starting to bleed together functionally. But at their core, they're designed to meet different needs. So databases are really, really focused on meeting one or two or three core needs for your organizations really well, be that fundraising, be that advocacy, be that campaign management, whatever those core needs are, there's a lot of systems out there that began as databases either online or offline and are now starting to bleed into what is called Constituent Relationship Management, or CRMs, because their owners and vendors are realizing that's what people want. Content management systems are the same way. You've probably heard stuff like CVCRM, and Sugar, and Salsa, and all of these other tools that were once designed to support just a web need or just a single kind of online functional need are moving over to adding more and more integrated functionality. And lastly, there are pure Constituent Relationship Management systems out there that began their lives as such as well. I happen to work on one of them, that is Salesforce platform, but there are many others out there. So I think the important thing to note here is that you're going to hear a lot of jargon, and what's going to be really important to you is not falling for the first alluring sales pitch, but rather understanding that implementing these in a lot of ways has nothing to do with what the tools actually are, and a lot to do with what's actually important to your organization and your mission. So I'm going to chat in just a quick article from Laura Quinn, whom I really respect. Just so the folks can see, even as long ago as 2012, we were sort of looking at that idea of how do we track everybody for our organization. And I think a message that you'll hear from Robert and myself over and over again is that there is no perfect solution. But if you follow a strategic path, one that helps you discern for your organization the difference between need and hype, understanding what organizational metrics, meaning like the numbers of people served or the amount of donations received through specific events or channels. If you understand those, and if you're able to make critical decisions about what needs to live in these tools, and particularly answer the question regarding do we need to just put everything in there, or do we just need to put what's important in there? You'll have a better sense of how to navigate this world, even with all the jargon and all the functional bleeds between these tools that's now starting to happen as we sort of enter into 2015 and beyond. So really, this is a long-winded way of saying, look at what the core product was designed to do first, and look at what your core needs are, rather than just letting a label, because everything in this day and age is going to get labeled CRM, because that's just where the marketing jargon is going. So let your core needs, which have nothing to do with the literal platform, derive your platform selection, not the other way around. And it's a cautionary tale to say that sometimes organizations, particularly when they're in dire straits with their data, will absolutely look at a tool and say, this looks like it can do it for us, and just go to it. Because you're all limited by time and money and capacity and budget and a number of other factors. So, you know, I know there's a lot of temptation to fall for that, but really the process begins outside of the tools first. And with that, Robert will tell us some common ways that nonprofits arrive at these tools. Thanks, Tracy. So I've probably worked with all of the different, these six types of nonprofits that I'm going to go through now. I've worked with clients who, one of their selection criteria was to buy a database because it was what's called cloud-based. It used to be called software as a service or a hosted platform. It doesn't live in their server room. It's run for them by their vendor, and the vendor takes care of the upgrades and the security and the backups, etc. Nonprofit B bought their database because it's not cloud-based. And I've had clients who, one of their first selection criteria is that it has to run on their own server because their internal security policies or what they're comfortable with is that they can get their arms around the hardware and their data. This is probably the most common way that I see organizations choosing a database because their really charming salesperson gave them a great pitch or said that they were giving them a really great deal. And I always remind my clients, you are not buying the salesperson. You may never interact with the salesperson again after you sign that contract. Nonprofit D bought their database because everybody knows it's the best. And what is quote-unquote the best has changed over time, and every vendor thinks that their own is the best or they really shouldn't be in business. But there really is no best. As Tracy said, there is no magic formula. There is no single system that is the best for everyone. But there should be a system out there that is the best for you, and that's the challenges to find that one. The next one bought their database because a charity that they, maybe their executive director, development director, or membership director used to work at or that they know a lot about uses it. But that charity is completely unlike their own organization. It's so much bigger. It has so much more IT support. It can take the system apart and put it back together in ways that the vendor never imagined. And that is utterly inappropriate for this particular nonprofit. And then the final tale is the nonprofit that bought their database because their board chair read about it in an in-flight magazine. That's only slightly jokey. Their board chair may have heard about it from a colleague. They may have learned about it from somebody they sat next to on an airplane. They may be on the board of another organization that's more like nonprofit E. It's vastly bigger and more complicated than this particular organization. But they think that the system should be appropriate for whatever organization they happen to be associated with. So Tracy is now going to talk about why this process is so friggin complicated. Yeah, and it is. It's so freaking insert cuss word here complicated. Part of the reason is because of something that I'm now starting to see having now in the Salesforce arena re-implementing organizations on the platform that they thought they implemented in three, five, or six years ago. And it's because part of selecting one of these tools involves organizational therapy. It really involves pulling people together between departments and having really hard discussions for your organization. And I think those hard discussions can be anything from do we all understand what we're talking about when we say somebody's household to do we have a common understanding of the outputs, meaning the evaluation metrics, the things that are most important to our organizational mission to uphold and say we define change by change in the following ways. Be it number of people served, dollars raised, campaigns won, campaigns lost, however much that value is. But the important thing is that these discussions take place first and they become an organic part of the selection process because I guarantee you what you want looks something like this. And to the earlier point that Robert and I have both been making, there is nothing like the Starship Enterprise out there. There really isn't. Everything that you would want to implement is going to partake in hard work and really understanding both your organizational limitations, how much time you have to put into it from management and understanding of the tool, and also the tool limitations, whatever one you select, there will be limitations. So really what you're getting is more akin to this. And it's really the case that wherever you go you will be required to do customization, configuration, data cleaning, data management, user training, and figure out an adoption process for your organization that's going to have people buying into it, not just to complete the project. A lot of organizations fall into that trap of like, we're going to just make this project happen no matter what, but then nobody uses the project that they've finished, but also beyond that. And hopefully some of the stuff that Robert and I will cover later will pop a little bit more in depth about that. So there's a ton of moving parts. And those moving parts are literally defined by everything from how much time and money you have, how much information you want to measure, who are the people and their personalities in your organization. And I have a catch phrase that I call the ego-driven nonprofit or the ego-driven department. And something that can happen during the course of selecting one of these tools is one department or one individual will sort of dominate the conversation. And as the selection process goes forward, the tool becomes more and more shaped to that one specific need at the consequence of locking other people out of feeling like they've been bought in. So getting everyone on the same page is really important. And you need to have an agreed upon strategy. Everyone should be on the same page. You need to have a really clear vision for success and have that grounded in reality. Some of the hardest conversations I'm having with folks as a consultant are, yes, we can do this, but you should not do this, because your organization doesn't have the capacity to take it and run with it right now. And also, too, discovery processes often reveal fault lines in your organization. So there needs to be a moment to resolve that before you move forward into any tool that wants to standardize how you operate. And I think the last two points that Robert and I would make on this is that there's also a lot of temptation because there is no perfect tool to want to just build your own. My brother, sister, cousin, husband, soft nurse, you were at 32 flavors last night, and he's going to build our own database for us. I would say please don't, because when folks build their own custom database, what that really means is the knowledge and skill set that produced that in the first place is going to leave when whoever built it leaves. I really try to encourage folks to move towards off the shelf solutions no matter what they are for this reason because your data and your database or your CRM or whatever you move to has to outlast the individuals and departments that are currently implementing it. And I think lastly, to Robert's earlier point, not everybody's alike. So if you're looking for suggestions, start joining communities of your own organizations. If you're working in the same sector, start talking to other insurgents and asking them what you're doing. If you're working in the education sector, ask your friends and colleagues what they're doing. So your community is often your best ally in helping also take apart a lot of these moving parts. And lastly, what I would say is whatever tool that you arrive at, there are going to be some moments where your implementation partner or your consultant or the person at the tool who's doing it for you is going to say, this is just not designed to do that. And part of why having some critical organizational discussions around your data and around your way that you actually work is so important is because when you implement a new tool, particularly if you're moving a very sophisticated tool, you know, when you're doing this, there's going to be moments where you're going to have to meet the tool where it's at and not the other way around. So, you know, let go of your little darlings. Don't build or buy on something that you're being sold, particularly if somebody tells you, oh, we're going to do that in the next release. Could be next month. It could be three years from now. And the last point I would make is that to the extent of my earlier point about the ego-driven nonprofit or the ego-driven department, making 100% of one person's or one department's needs happen on these tools will actually make fewer departments less able to meet even half of those needs. So, we have a system of organizational compromise. It's a system of understanding what's good for the organization and not just the person in the department. And more and more and more, it's a strategic process. So, I will turn over to Robert to talk about how to make this process a bit successful. Great. So, one of the key components here, and we keep talking about databases, CRMs, association management systems, whatever it is that you're going to use to manage your organization's relationships and fundraising and membership income, et cetera. They're not a magic wand. They do not stand alone. They will not fix organizational problems all by themselves. So, we're looking at three corners of a stool or a triangle here. Technology is only one of them. You have to have the right people with the right skills and the right training and in the right roles to actually manage the systems. And you have to have good business processes. If you're putting junk data into a beautiful database because people haven't been trained, you are going to have a junk database no matter how much time and money you may have spent on it. And all of this needs to surround your mission. So, you need to get the right system, the right tools and have the right people and the right processes for whatever your organization is trying to accomplish. And under each of those corners of the triangle, there are various components. So, under the people category, do you have support at the top? Do you have executive sponsorship? Are they clearing the path for you? Are they making sure that decisions get made? Are they making sure that you have the time and the resources that you need to be successful? And are other departments collaborating with you? This is particularly critical if you're going into a CRM, which is generally seen as an organization-wide system. So, no single department will be completely in charge of it. You need to work across what are typically organizational silos. So, you can read the rest under people, under process. Do you have the right people overseeing the project? Is it being run just by a single person or a single department when it's meant to reach across multiple departments? Or do you have a good process in place for making decisions collaboratively that benefit the entire organization? Again, do you have good budgeting for the project? Do you have good project planning? Do you know where you're going? Do you know what success looks like? And then there's the technology piece. And there are fewer bullets under the technology piece, but technology obviously is critical. Do you have good project management to get you there? Are you using a good vendor's election process? Are you evaluating the vendor properly? And is it a system that you can actually maintain? Because if you don't go through that kind of intelligent process, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to add, dude, to the point about people in particular, in case folks are wondering, like, what is an executive sponsor and what is that person? Every project that implements new technology, and it can be what we're talking about, such as a CRM or a database or a contact management system, or even just, you know, hey, we're going to put in a new set of computers for people. If you have an executive sponsor and you have a project manager at your organization, ideally those are two different people. And the job of the project manager is to literally interface with the staff, with your implementation vendor, with whomever else is necessary to actually move forward on the work at hand. But the executive sponsor is usually somebody who is a manager at the organization. They can also be the executive director or a board member. And it's that person's responsibility to really hold for the fact that, you know, doing this is going to take up people's time and effort and energy as part of their everyday work. And the executive sponsor makes room for people to do that. This is not the kind of thing where you can simply say, oh, you know, we're going to do our event in two months, but we're also going to implement the CRM over the next three months. And that's grinding your folks, you know, and that's adding work on top of work. So the role of the executive sponsor is to manage literal staff workload to get buy-in and in some cases be bad cop and put their foot down and say, no, you can't do this or we are doing this this way and this is how it's going to be for the organization. So I just want to make that clear because when you have good sponsorship of a project, it makes the project implementer or the project manager's job a lot easier and they can really focus on being the interface to the people who are most critically needing to supply information to it while the project manager makes everybody's lives easier. Sorry, the executive sponsor makes everybody's lives easier. I just wanted a hammer on that. And the sponsor needs to have the authority and respect to reach across the organization and respect to people in departments. So if IT doesn't see your project as a priority, your project is not going to make progress. So you need someone at a high enough level to tell IT that this is a critical project and they need to get behind it, for instance. So if you don't have all of those key pieces in place, it's incredibly hard to succeed in this kind of project. No matter what software you've got, you need to have the buy-in from the key players and this is the not part of how not to choose a database. If you don't proceed intelligently and strategically in this project, you're not going to have buy-in. I've seen so many of these projects abandoned midway through or you get the database and it's bright and shiny and new and nobody uses it. You've wasted a ton of time. You've wasted a ton of money. You may not be able to ever recapture that money to do the project properly in the future and in the end, the project will be deemed a failure. Tracy, anything to add? Yeah, to your point on failure, Robert, I think it's really important to also call out that failure in the nonprofit sector is a dirty word. It's a dirty word that nobody likes to say because generally what failure means is you're never going to get the resources and time to do something again because you've either had it funded by a single grant or you've annoyed a major donor or the community event came and went or the moment came and went. But in fact, failure in the real world, the quote-unquote for-profit world, is one of the most critical learning moments that you can ever have. Oh, I'm hearing a lot of, I have no audios. Do you hear me or no? I'm hearing you, Tracy, but I have seen a couple of messages come in. So we're going to reach out to those folks in particular. If you're having issues with the audio, let us know. And you can always dial into the toll-free phone number which may be a little bit more consistent than the streaming audio. It just depends. So we'll chat that number out again one more time in case anyone has issues. Cool. So yeah, we did a workshop not this past year but a year ago at the Ensign Conference. It was all about failure. And the point being that nonprofits operate under many constraints, and fear of failure is a big one, but it really is the case that if an inordinate amount of IT projects in the real world fail, you are almost going to have at least one during the course of your tenure at your organization that will also fail for you. And that's okay. It is actually what happens in the world. So it's a learning moment more than anything else. And that's really important to be able to articulate how to change what happens next. So we have time for a couple of questions if folks have been chatting things in Becky or if folks want to take a moment and chat things in. Yep. We do have a question from Ron asking, on the staffing that you showed a couple of slides back, do you need both an executive sponsor and a project manager? And I would say you do. The executive sponsor, and this is, we're trying to project an ideal world. There are things that are out of your control so you may not be able to manifest both a project manager and an executive sponsor. But usually the executive sponsor is at a higher level in the organization and isn't involved hands-on in the day-to-day management of the project. The project manager needs to be involved day-to-day in keeping the project moving forward, getting decisions made, making sure the right people are involved, et cetera. And I'll actually just paint, you know, a worst-case scenario about this and say, you know, the worst-case scenarios that I've seen and, you know, are things like, well, we don't really have anybody here but an intern who's working on this project for summertime. Or, well, you know, our one sort of beleaguered accidental techie is the person who's responsible for this whole thing. And, you know, she doesn't necessarily have any reach across the organization or support from management to get it done because the message that's being delivered is just make it happen and we don't need to understand. So really calling out to the executive sponsor is also a way of saying that as technology leaders at your organization and as executives at your organization, understanding technology and understanding technology management and proper project implementation is as critical as understanding finance, human resources, and many of the other operational aspects of what nonprofits do. Great. We also had... Oh, go ahead. So I wanted to respond to a follow-up on that. If you're in a tiny nonprofit and you don't have enough layers in the organization to have an executive sponsor and a project manager, that doesn't mean that you can't do the project. As I said, we're not... We recognize that there are things that are out of your control and you can't suddenly hire an executive director if you're an all-volunteer organization. But we're trying to project a more perfect world for you. Yeah. What it does mean, however, is that whatever tool you're working on or selecting, there may be features that you just shouldn't implement because you won't have the time or money or capacity to carry them forward. That's really what that means at the smaller orgs. Great. We also had one person that asked earlier, what do you do if you have a board member who says, I want you to use this tool because I bought it for you and I think it's great. And you've got IT staff that say, not great, hate that tool, don't want to use it. How do you negotiate that kind of conversation? Because so often you did mention in your examples of nonprofits, often a tool is bestowed upon people not necessarily for the right reasons. And how do you massage that conversation? That is tough and that is real. I've seen that happen with several clients. And again, we cannot fix every political problem or management problem in your organization. It's really tough to say no to a board member or a major donor or the executive director when they come up with an idea that is really wrong. The best that you can do is make the case that this is not the right tool and this is why. So you should have done your homework and say we need a tool that does A, B, and C. We have the capacity to manage a tool that is using this kind of technology or we have no capacity to manage a complicated piece of software and that's what you're pointing us towards. We don't have the budget to afford that software or to afford the ongoing maintenance. We don't have the time to retweak that software and make it work for us. So if you've done your homework, you can make an intelligent argument of the pros and cons of that software, but it may be an argument that you're going to lose. Yeah, I'm actually challenging, or not challenging, I'm channeling a colleague when I say this and one of the lessons that is a learnable one for anybody in that position is to say yes and so here in that position where a tool is being kind of given to you and said this is what we're going to do, one of the questions you can ask is yes, and how does this tool actually help us meet our mission? And I find that sometimes taking it back to commonly agreed upon goals, taking it back to an organizational mission and taking it back to things that should ideally be the reason why we're all at a nonprofit. Like I care about this, we care about that. How is this? Yes, I see your point. And how is this specific tool going to help us do this in a way that is respectful of everybody's time and capacity? And that's where having some discussions before a tool that's selected could be helpful to have everybody identify that moment for themselves. Great. I think we can go ahead and move forward to the next section. Keep asking your questions, folks, because we'll have more opportunities to pause. Then we'll have Q&A at the end. Great. So I'm going to talk very briefly about how to go through this decision-making process. We have a lot of resources at the end of this presentation about how to go into detail about how to do this, but I'm going to skim over the top. There are just a ton of choices out there. I maintain a list of every donor database and CRM that I come across, and I think that I've got about 175 systems listed there now. So how do you make a choice among so many different options? The first thing you need to do is know what you're looking for. You need to be a smart shopper. If you just go out and randomly look at systems, randomly see demos from vendors who may or may not be appropriate for you, you're just going to be paralyzed. And when we asked for people to chat, what's the state of your database now and what's wrong now, one of the chats that we got back was, I'm overwhelmed. This can be overwhelming. So you need to focus. You need to say, I am looking for a system that does A, B, C, and D. And of those four things, and it's probably going to be more like 40 things or maybe 400 things, of those four things, A is critical. We cannot live without it. B is nice to have. It's almost critical. C and D, we could live without if we had to or if we can't afford them or we simply can't find them. So you need to know what you're looking for. And there are a lot of different moving parts in making this kind of decision and vendors price in different ways. So how many users are going to be using the system? How many records are going to be in? Does it need to manage memberships or just fundraising? Does it need to be able to keep track of your donor clubs? Does it need to manage grants, major gifts, volunteers, et cetera? You need to know what the system needs to do for you and then prioritize those needs so that you know what the deal breakers are and then prioritize the nice to have so you know which ones are at the top of your list. And then you can be a smart shopper and spend your time on systems that aren't going to do what you need to do or that you can't afford. So that's one of your filters is your budget and exclude systems that are wildly outside of your price range. And then you can look at systems intelligently. And I spend a lot of my focus on comparing apples to apples. So I ask each vendor to show me the same things that I or my client have identified as being critical. The top, the deal breakers, and then the top, nice to have so that we can say, yes, this system handles major gifts really well and that other system doesn't have it at all. This system can track our grants and the entire grant seeking process or the entire grant management process and this other one not so well. And the way to do that, the way that I approach that is by creating a script for the demos. So the script, once you've got a pool of potential vendors and I'm not going to get into a lot of detail about how to identify that pool right on this conversation, but once you've got a pool of potential vendors, ideally three or four, tell them what you need to see and that can just be a simple set of bullet points saying show us how to create a new record, show us how to join two people who are married, show us how to enter some different gifts or memberships, show us how to manage an event. So this is a sample of a simple database demo script. So Barney Rubble, he's a $25 donor and then we've got this other $10,000 donor who gives multi-year pledges through her family foundation, very complicated or maybe she gives through a donor advised fund and she gets soft credited as the individual who drove in that gift but the actual tax credit goes to the family foundation. And then Barney and Betty get married or we learn later that they have been married the entire time and we just didn't know it. So now we need to make them into a joint record so that their giving gets credited together and we need to change her last name and we need to make sure that when we're looking at their donor record that it includes both of their gifts plus the gifts from her family foundation all together summarized. And then oops, say divorce. So what do we do now? We want them to both to be major donors after the divorce because Barney got half of Betty's estate. He had a really good lawyer. So what happens now? How do we keep stewarding Barney whereas previously Betty was the main source of contact and funding for our organization. And this is a trivial, simple example of things you can ask every vendor to show you but you should know what you're asking every vendor and treat them the same way. And you should keep track of what you're seeing when you see each demo. So I invite everybody who's interested you should have a core group of stakeholders who are going through this process. If you've only got two people in your organization it's going to be a very small group. But if you've got a large organization you will probably have six to maybe 12 people who are going through this. But I invite everybody who's interested so it could be volunteers, it could be board members potentially and collect input from all of them on what they're seeing, what they liked, what they didn't like, what totally confused them, what other questions arose that the script didn't deal with and then review that and summarize and decide which vendors or vendor ideally really knocked it out of the park and which one or ones you think are really worth pursuing for further review. So in going through this process and going through your needs assessment try to look ahead to the extent you can. It's very hard to see very far into the future particularly if you're a rapidly changing organization but try to think three to five years ahead as to where you're going. So if you expect to be going into a capital campaign if you expect to be launching a major gift effort if you expect to be adding a membership program whereas in the past you haven't had one think ahead for those kinds of needs and make sure that the vendors address them. But on the other hand, you want to try to be aware of shiny object syndrome. So you want to buy a system that really can meet your actual needs today and as far into the future as you can see them and not things that you probably won't ever use but they're just so cool and sexy that it's hard to say no to them. It can be tough to distinguish the shiny objects from reality but to the extent you can you should really do that. Because if you don't, you're not going to know what you're looking for. You're going to be seduced by cool shiny features that really don't serve your organization's needs. You're going to have a poor selection project because you focused on the wrong things or you're going to have bought the best sales person among the ones you talked to but it's not the best product for you and in the end your selection project may be completely derailed and you'll have to start all over. Tracy, anything to add to that? No, I don't think so. I think really and truly what this boils down to is knowing what's in front of you and there was a couple of questions to that effect. It was like, oh, we don't do everything all at once and that's the point that I would actually make coming out of this is that when you're selecting things it's nice to know the full range of your criteria but when you're implementing things it's not necessarily super successful to do everything at once. You need to have some sense of scope and priority to this and the prioritization of needs that you developed during the selection process can help guide an implementation process to help give order to the things that you're implementing so that folks aren't overwhelmed. And that's a great point. So on the one hand you need to see where you're going. You need to understand the big picture but it often makes sense to phase the project in and say, okay, our core need is donor management or our core need is volunteer management or our core need is event management and that is going to lead off the project and we will then come into the rest of those pieces when we have time and money. We can pause now and see if there are any additional questions. Becky, is there anything we haven't addressed yet? Sure, well we do have a couple of questions. Stephanie asks a good question. So how do you know how to prioritize requirements when you haven't utilized the CRM before? Like how do you know what you don't know? Is there a resource that can outline here common things you can find and pick which of these are most valuable to your needs so that somebody has a starting place if they've never used something like this? That's a great question and it is tough to know what you don't know. So one of the resources at the end of this presentation is a report from Idealware called a Consumer's Guide to Donor Management Systems and it reviews, they started with I think about 100 systems. They narrowed it down to about 30 and then they focused on their top 11. But I think the most useful part of that report is the section called what these systems can do and read that section of the report and think about which of those things that systems can do are things that you want a system to do and then prioritize which of those things you need a system to do versus merely want a system to do. Yeah, you kind of also have to develop a way to put objective measure of subjective need into the process. So oftentimes knowing what you don't know begins with having the discussions around like how do we really want to manage people? What do we want to group them at? What's important to us? But ultimately if you've developed a list of criteria you can actually ask folks at your organization to rank those criteria in an order of like one to 10 from like what they don't need to what is their absolute must and that can help you develop some averages so that when you get to a tool you can say, well, these are our most important things. You really need to show us how these important things work in your tool otherwise it's a deal breaker. Great, we also had a couple of people asking, you know, if you were picking, one person asked is there a way to grow into a database? Can you start with one thing and then add other features? And it kind of relates to a couple of questions from other people like Carly and Jim are both asking similar questions around what are the most important things to start with? What are the basics that maybe everybody would want to start with? And maybe that's not the right way to frame it because I know it's going to depend a little bit on what those needs are and requirements are but are there core pieces that you think organizations could really start with, the low hanging fruit, anything like that? Tracy, you want to take the lead on this? Sure, you know, most organizations start with one simple fundraising or programmatic need. They say, I need a new fundraising system. I need to manage our volunteers better. And I think the trick there is that it's good to know what core need you want to start with but to the point about growing into a system, you need to be somewhat aware of where you want to go in the next few months to the next year with your expectations of what you want in that system. So it's still going to require that conversation. It's going to require your development director saying I need a new fundraising system but I also need to talk to all of you about how you're engaging with our people because I can't just necessarily pick one fundraising system in the absence of understanding at least a rudimentary perspective of other people's needs across this organization where the tool that I pick might not actually be appropriate in any way at all for what they need. And the really hard part of that is when you start with one core need, making sure that you say yes to the right things and no to the right things so that as you bring other departments and other people at your organization into the tool, they've got room to grow into it as well. And that's really a dance between making sure that whatever vendor you're looking at now to meet that one core need has answers for future growth. And those answers can't be, yeah, yeah, we'll just do that when we get there. So make them show you some of how whatever platform you're considering can grow to meet those needs. And we started this presentation by saying this is complicated. That's why we're doing this webinar. I have a client right now where there are two departments with critical needs driving the project. One is fundraising. They need a better way of managing their major donors in particular. The other is volunteer management. Both of them need a new system and because so many of their volunteers are donors and so many of their donors are volunteers, it should be a system that's either a single system that can do both or two systems that can talk to each other. They need to, they don't necessarily need to bring up both sides together. The volunteers need to be addressed first because that's a more critical problem. However, if they don't look ahead to being able to support their major donor needs when they choose a system to manage their volunteers, they will not be able to achieve that big goal. They will achieve the small goal for volunteer management and not the big goal for the entire organization. So yes, they can face things. No, they can't simply choose a volunteer system and hope that it will manage major donors in the future because most of them can't. Exactly. And vice versa is true as well and there's a couple of questions about integrating systems and that sort of thing. And when systems are capable of integrating with each other, either because the vendor tells you so or your implementation partner tells you so, that can be very advantageous to helping your organization choose the right tool for the right job to keep your data in sync. What a lot of folks don't necessarily state up front is there's two things about integrating systems at least that I would bring to immediate attention of your organization. One, not all integration is possible and therefore you need to know what information should move between what tools and under what conditions and that's a very distinct discussion because it connects directly to what's most important to your organization to understand centrally as part of like whatever core metrics it's being, you know, deemed appropriate. And the other discussion that really needs to happen is you can go with the best tool for the best job when they integrate but what that also means is that people need to be trained and really understand why they're going to a specific tool versus a different one in an integrated ecosystem. Otherwise, you know, you'll have people trying to do things, you know, in the wrong system for the wrong reasons. So that's a whole other discussion around a very technical thing called business process re-engineering to support the integration. And when all that data lands in your integrated system, there'll be even more things that you can and can't do because, you know, it might not be as simple as I'm going to go to this contact record and change the email address because that email address is being supplied by another integrated system. And if I change it in the core system, what does that mean for the integration? So all of these are discussions that need to be had around integrated tools. And I remember I got really snippy once at an integration vendor who said, yeah, anything is possible. Anything is not possible because by making anything possible, you actually will have the core systems. So, integration discussions around understanding what's most important and under which conditions. I see your audio drop-down moment, Charlie, but I think you're back. Yep. Yeah, but I think so. So we should go ahead and try and move this along. We've got a bit of time before we want to break for Q&A. So let's speed through this last section. And Tracy, on to you. Great. So, you know, there's the selection process. There's the developing of the criteria for the selection process. There's the actual conversion to the new system and then the implementation moving forward. And I just want to talk briefly about what that looks like and some considerations for that next step. So, you know, first of all, surviving a conversion to a new system, you know, again, to the earlier points we've already talked about, you need to have an active partner inside your organization who's really, you know, driving the process with the right kind of executive support. And that person has the space and time to work with any external consultants or vendors. And part of this is also bridging a very traditional divide in communications between information technology and executive leadership. And we won't have time to really go into that, but it is a factor sometimes. Those are two arms to nonprofits that have very, very difficult times talking to each other sometimes. So, you know, part of surviving the conversion is, again, what Robert already spoken about, and that is what is success to your organization and what is the scope of success. And remembering that you are the experts in your own processes and procedures, not the vendor, not the implementation partner, not the sales guy. So, you'll have a better understanding of your own sales than any of those folks would. And your job is partially to communicate that vision of success to those folks if you're working with them. And that brings up a point around how much help will you need. And, you know, I've seen organizations who are super savvy do really smart technology conversions and implementations in the Salesforce sector. I've seen organizations who think they are really savvy do it and fall on their face. So, really, you know, part of this is really understanding your own limitations. And, you know, it's the points we've already made. You know, this is an investment in your mission and an organization that should outlast the actors currently present. So, this is not a job for your AmeriCorps intern or, you know, your summer hire or that one-believered person who is, you know, supporting all your technology to do alone. And, you know, part of this also that vendors don't discuss is data migration. You know, so you've got this great new tool. Well, now you have stuff from your organization, all sheets, other databases, et cetera, that you want to put into it. That will take time. There is a generally kind of open process of data mapping, picking what's important out of your old data, and then moving it into the new system that will absolutely take time and hard decision-making. And, you should really plan for cleaning up your data as best you can in your legacy systems first. You should really plan for letting go of things that, you know, might look super important in the old tools, but actually don't forward your organization's mission or goals moving forward. A lot of organizations will be like, we want all our data in the new system. And that's not necessarily the most successful strategy because if you're not going to do anything with it, other than have it sit there, why are you using it in the first place? It will add time and expense to the conversion process. And, you know, lastly, consider drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know, this is what's important to us from this date or time onward or from this process onward or whatever that line looks like because in the end, you're implementing a new tool because it's future-looking, not past-looking. And I think where organizations get into trouble sometimes, they try to make the new tool look exactly like the old tool. And that will never be the case. Also, to talk a little bit about how long this can take, you know, a realistic timeline can be something that will really help a project succeed. And there's more parameters on that than just, you know, saying we're going to implement a new database, you know, from start to finish in two months. You know, this is where we're talking with colleagues. This is where reaching out to trusted advisors. This is where knowing your organization and the sector that it sits in and watching other people have it go through this can be really invaluable to you because then you can talk to somebody who said, oh my goodness, we tried to do this in three months and it nearly destroyed our organization. I wish we did it in six months instead. So really, you know, make a timeline that's realistic and isn't predicated on a big thing happening at the end of the implementation, whatever that would be. We're going to get this database up and running for our spring gala in June. That is a recipe for stress and disaster. And it really does go back in some ways to, you know, the good, cheap, and fast to adage. And one of my old bosses used to actually say, you know, you can't even pick two. You should just pick one and let that one criteria define everything else. So, you know, there's different ways of evaluating timelines and some of these can also be realistically provided by implementation partners who are working with the tools that you've selected. Lastly, you know, I would also say on timeline, you know, less time requires more money and more people. And sudden changes at the end of a project can cost you a lot of time and money and people because this goes all the way back to making things inclusive from the get-go. And if you've pulled the right people into the right decision-making, you know, conversations, you've pulled the right metrics into it, there won't be surprises at the end. Sometimes what happens at the very end of a project that was never included says, wait, this is a deal breaker for my department or this is a deal breaker for how I do work. And it derails the whole thing or you have to spend a lot more money making the thing that you've already picked do something you didn't consider. So, you know, again, to the point on failure and time and money, you know, this is very real and giving things appropriate space to happen will be important. And, you know, Robert, did you want to talk on this one a little bit? Sure. So, we showed a slide earlier, say, that said help and you may need external help in order to get through this project. But as you're going through this project, it's also a learning opportunity for your organization. So, ideally, your project manager to get you through this, your internal project manager will stay with the organization. You won't have burned them out during the project and they will then manage the system going forward and they'll have learned a ton about your data and your business processes and why some data looks the way it does in the new system and why some data isn't in the new system and what different departments need. So, you have learned to fish as part of the project even if you've brought in technical help from the outside. You should not be outsourcing your organizational strategy. No vendor, no consultant should tell you this is how you should be running your organization and why you need to change your mission in order to work with the database that you've just bought. It shouldn't be the other way around. So, I think, too, I'm learning to fish. Sometimes a person or person during the course of doing these projects will emerge as highly engaged and very smart and savvy. And, you know, this gets to the point of change management and transition management which is literally the growth that people experience as part of doing this. You know, if you have one person and she's been your technical lead on the project, she's learned all about the tool. It can sometimes be soul-crossing to say, congratulations, you've implemented it, go back to your old work. So, know that as part of this process, too, you might have someone who's really learned to fish for your organization and you may need to consider changing their job to better align the work that they're now doing with the tool that you've selected. Great point. And Tracy, this one's yours. Ah, yes. And, you know, to the earlier questions that I think, you know, we've already talked about this a little bit. Like, don't try and do everything at once. You know, find your power users during the course of the project. Find the people who are demonstrating the most aptitude towards whatever you're doing and encourage them, because they'll be the folks who can help you get buy-in from your coworkers later on down the road. They'll be the folks who become resources for other people at your organization. I'm a huge believer in, you know, adoption curves that have many people participating in a shared learning environment and there are some tools that can help facilitate that that can be as simple as chat tools and complicated as Salesforce, you know, chatter and facilitate that, but, you know, make sure that there's a thought out rollout plan. Make sure that your goal for the project is not fire all your guns into space and explode at once, you know, like make sure that people literally have time to not only learn the changes, but make the transition between old and new. One is a management of prophecies. One is a management of people. And they're both super important as part of this. And to leave one behind is to, you know, do certain aspects of your project. I'm going to skip ahead because we're getting signals from our moderator that we need to wrap things up. So I'm going to just sum up this section that if you don't go through the intelligent after going to the intelligent selection process, if you don't go through a strategic implementation project, these are the risks that you're going to face. Cost overruns because you didn't budget enough time and so you had to throw more money at it or more people at it. You don't have enough people to actually devote to the project, so Tracy showed that slide of people plus money plus time are the ingredients in this kind of project. So you need to make sure that you have all three of those. You need to make sure that you have a definition of success and that you stay focused on that definition of success and try to avoid scope creep, which is we started with this little project that was only going to manage volunteers and now we're managing everything in the organization under this same project with the same budget and the same people and we are falling apart. Yeah, and I would only add to that that giving yourself ample time to understand what you're doing and ample time to implement what you're doing can help buffer if you do run into an unknown unknown. And when it comes to post-conversion, that's also equally important. And so this really ties it all together. Simply buying a piece of software and implementing it even under the most ideal circumstances, which most of us don't live in, but going to a perfect process of selection and conversion. If you don't plan for what happens after you flip the switch and the new software goes live, if no one is in charge of that database, if you don't have standards for how your data gets entered, if staff haven't been trained to follow those standards, if no one's paying attention, it is all going to fall apart because the equivalent of a brand new shiny car and the back seat is filled with wrappers from fast food joints and cups and whatever trash you've been pitching into the back without paying any attention. And you have the resale value of that brand new shiny vehicle in the first few days of not paying attention to it. So you need to plan ahead and make sure that someone is in charge, someone owns that database and is overseeing it and keeping it bright and shiny into the long-term future. And I think, you know... I'm sorry, Tracy, go ahead. I was going to say, I think to pull this all together, there is nothing that is going to be perfect. It will always be a decision-making process of needs and consequences. And that's especially relevant to a project where you might have one department that gets 100% of its needs met, but everybody else gets maybe 20% net. I would call a much more successful project one where everybody is comfortably getting 75% or 80% of their needs because there's always going to be a limitation no matter where you go. And to some of the points that Robert made about the choice process, prioritizing and understanding real capacity and comparing things that are apples to apples and putting in this time for adoption and time for post-adoption, which any one of these modern systems is not an Excel sheet and expecting it to act and behave as a single-purpose delivery system of your information is not how these tools work. You need to literally change the management of your organization to understand how to administer and grow these tools over the long haul. And it is super hard. We're not saying this is easy. These discussions can get very heated and very difficult because of the fact that everybody feels like they have a stake in it. And that's where having a prioritization of that stake can help people understand where they're going next. And having that executive sponsor to help resolve those disagreements and clear the road for the project to move ahead. So in wrapping up, we've put a bunch of resources at the end of our slide deck. So you will all be getting those if you haven't already downloaded them. You can do that. And some of them are general, like database user groups. That's the user group for your particular database, whatever you have or choose. But most of these have links to actual documents. And with that, this is how to reach us in the future if you have more questions that we don't get to today, but we still have a few more minutes for questions if Becky, if you want to transmit anything else to us. Terrific. Thank you both so much. Really informational and also aspirational of the way to do things that can help you really come away with a solution that works best for your organization. Before we move into Q&A, I'm going to go ahead and show, since many of you are asking about tools in the chat, we do have donor management and CRM donations available through TechSoup's website and we don't have all of them by any stretch. We have no 175 CRM lists like Robert has, but we do have a handful of them. You can find them. There's a whole section dedicated to donor and grants management tools. And you can see here on this slide, just to give you an example, since I'm not showing it live on the site, there's a drop-down menu here. And so there's a Grants Management Tool section and there's also a CRM section. So you can look there to find many of these tools I'm highlighting on this slide. And when you get the slide deck, all of these little logos are clickable that will take you directly to the pages of any of these. And the link at the very top of the page is a comparison spreadsheet. And it's actually a PDF, two-page long, lots of columns that give you a detailed comparison of all of these tools against one another. And I think the only one that's not on it is Microsoft Dynamics CRM, since that's a pretty large enterprise CRM. So we primarily focus on comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges, as Robert recommended. But these are comparing the tools that are available for donation in TechSoup's catalog. So if you're considering one of these, it's a great resource to look at the different features. And we've already done some of that homework for you. Additionally, we have a donor and grants management article section where we have links to articles on the types of databases for managing constituents or the different types of CRM tools. So you can find a lot of resources on our site. Robert also mentioned the Databases and Software Forum, and that's one that he helps manage here at TechSoup. So you can reach out to him and post a question in the forums that Robert is most likely going to be able to answer for you directly. So we'll share that link out and invite you to come there to ask questions that we maybe don't have time to get to today. But in the meantime, I want to cover some of the questions that are in the queue already. So John asks, what is a reasonable timeframe? It's three months too short, and I know your answer is going to be, it depends. But I personally have seen, if you can find an off the shelf product that really suits some of your immediate needs and get it plugged in and you have a pretty clean data set to put in, sure, you can be up and running. In other cases where TechSoup just moved to NetSuite CRM, which is in our catalog, and it's like an 18 month deployment schedule, an implementation schedule that's ramping up and involving probably 20 people. So it can really depend, but I would love to get your take on that. So how about Robert, let me get your take on that question. What is a reasonable timeframe? So you're exactly right, it depends. For the process I go through, a fast selection project is three to four months, and four to six is pretty typical for a small to mid-sized organization, but for a large organization, it can be a year or two. And the same on the implementation, which is the second part of the project. I've seen it done in six weeks to two months. That's a very fast project. I generally advise my clients to double whatever the vendor or consultant tells you, because there are so many unknown unknowns in your organization and in their timeline. But you can do it in less than two months if you're a very small organization with simple data. But if you're a big organization involving multiple offices and multiple parts of the organization in the project, it can take years. So as Becky said, it depends. Tracy? Yeah, I can only offer sort of a thumbnail bullet point list to compliment what we've already stated, Robert. None of you know what I mean. Try and estimate conversion times for clients. Keep in mind several factors. One is how many sources of data do you have that you want to put into this new tool? How complex is that data? Is it just people and organizations? Or is it people, organizations, donations, volunteer hours, fund codes? How big is that data? Is it 50,000 highly complex records? Or is it 2 million very simple records? Or is it some other variable on that sliding scale? And I also try to ask people realistically, how much time are they willing to devote to the process internally? Because doing this with somebody at your organization and weeding it can take anything from 25% of their time per week, right on through to their entire 40-hour week. So knowing that and also knowing when you're willing to spend money and when you're not, those components together can also develop a realistic timeline. So again, most organizations in my world that come to me with reasonably clean, not super complex data, and somewhat clear goals for what they want to accomplish can get up and running relatively quickly, maybe four months. But like to Robert's point, I've been part of enterprise implementation projects where the timeline is great. We'll start now in 2014 and we'll be done by the end of 2016. So it really does vary, but small organizations can be much more agile in their approach, but there is one danger there and that is that in doing so, you're not necessarily building supportive processes and procedures to what you're implementing. Great points. Having been in a really small organization where we adopted Salesforce, which is a really robust, big tool. It's got a lot of power behind it. We decided that the quickest way for us to get into it and start using it as a staff of like five people was just to not worry about customizations, just to get over some of the lingo and say, okay, it's going to call a donor a customer and that's okay. Or whatever those little tweaks are that maybe we would have liked to have done, but they would have taken us a lot longer. So we made some opportunity cost decisions too that helped us just get in and start using it more quickly, and that helped us a lot as a small organization. This is a food for thought. Customizations can certainly extend the amount of time it takes to launch something. The old adage, garbage in, garbage out is just as important if you're a tiny organization or a big organization. If your data is already in good shape, then it's going to be a lot easier for you to move it into something else than if it's a lot of outdated junk that needs to be cleaned. That all has to happen no matter what tool you're using or what process. That's got to be part of it. We also have a question. Matthew asks, is there a listing of the most socially responsible CRM vendors anywhere? I don't know about that one myself. Yeah, I haven't seen one. Yeah, and I haven't either. I mean, you can learn a little bit about the organization by looking at who's leading them and what political and social causes they support, but that's just more correlation in second party information. I haven't seen anything that talks about that directly. Okay, I thought it was worth asking because it would be great if there was something like that. We also have questions. We had a handful of people earlier on in the program that had asked questions about gift works and just said that gift works has moved into a subscription service and now their data is trapped. The question isn't so much about gift works, but it's about what happens if the vendor you choose changes the rules and how do you get your stuff back out? How do you know upfront what you can take out and how you can get it out? Is that something that you recommend as part of the review process? How do you recommend people figuring that stuff out before they decide on a vendor? It is something that I recommend as part of the review process and it's also something that you can talk to references about checking up on that vendor. I would want the ability to be able to run exports and downloads and backups of my data myself, regardless of the backups that the vendor is running on a regular basis as needed because you know that the night before your big gala, your connection to the Internet is going to go down and the only access you're going to have to your data is whatever you have locally on your own server or your own desktop that you can throw into Excel. It's Murphy's Law of Donor Management and I have also seen organizations who were trapped by their vendors going out of business and taking all of their data with them. So I strongly advocate not only being able to but also taking advantage of the ability to export and run backups of your data on some regular basis at least once a month. Vendors can and do change the rules and that is often why folks will come and say, well I just want to build something custom so nobody owns it but us. I've seen this in the Salesforce sector now. A lot of folks who were using a tool called Common Ground was acquired from KZO to BlackBaud and then shut down. And in some ways there's no way that you can predict that and in some ways the answer really is you're screwed because vendors will change rules and they'll promise we're going to be around for a while and then an acquisition will happen, a merger will happen, a sudden quarter loss will happen and that does change the rules. The best suggestion I can offer there is that at least if you go through a process that helps you understand your organization and its needs in a cogent manner, that's the real legacy there is the understanding of self in support of mission to help you iterate again and find a new tool. Great sage advice and Robert's example of the data all disappearing or not being accessible before the Gala is one I think many of us have lived over time in real life. So with that I'd love to go ahead and wrap it up because we're at the half hour time here but go ahead and chat into us to let us know one thing you learned in today's webinar that either you'll try and implement or that you're going to consider in your process while looking for a new donor database. And like I said we invite you to join us in our databases and software forum for more questions to get answered and to also see what other users in our community are talking about with different programs they're using and different solutions they've found. I'm going to go ahead and show the contact info once again. You'll get this later today as well by email. You'll get this full slide deck and this recording so you can reach out to Tracy or Robert if you have more questions. Starting right now I'd love to invite you to join us in our forums for our soup chat that's starting at this moment on collaborating online with Box if you're interested in online file sharing and cloud collaboration. There's a live chat starting right now in our forums and Allie's going to go ahead and chat that link out if you'd like to join us there. We'd also like you to join us next week. We have a bunch of webinars coming up through April. Next week's is online fundraising strategies and specifically around giving days like Give Local America that's coming up on May 5th and how you can leverage those to raise funds for your own organization locally. Then we'll be talking about nonprofit and values based brands and how to work on your brand and make it better and how to manage it better. We'll be talking about our tablets just toys on the 16th, how to actually work with using tablets and mobile devices, and be a little greener since it is Earth Month coming up very soon. We'll talk about social services at the library so if you're joining us from a library it's a great opportunity to join and learn about referral services for social needs. Then we'll talk about how to find free and legal to use images and media online. Join us for those. Also connect with us at TechSoup Global, TechSoup.org, and on our Facebook and Twitter. Thank you so much to Robert and Tracy for all of your expertise today. Thanks to all of our participants for sharing and answering questions, chatting in with us, and just taking part. Lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of today's platform so that we can present these webinars to you on a regular basis. When you close out, please complete the post-event survey to help us continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you so much, everybody. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye. Thank you, Becky. Thank you.