 Welcome to 4 Non-Profit CRM Strategies. My name is Becky Wiegand, and again I'm your host for today's webinar here at TechSoup's Headquarters in San Francisco. We'll also be joined today by David Geilhofer, who is the Senior Director of NetSuite.org, and he will be our presenter sharing his expertise and experience with having helped nonprofits use and develop CRMs and choose CRMs in a variety of different capacities. He'll give us a little bit more detail about his experience from basically starting at community-based public computing centers and creating those to working for organizations like CVCRM and now NetSuite.org. We'll hear more from him in just a couple of minutes. Again my name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. I've been with this organization for about 6 years and prior to that had a decade of working for small nonprofits based in Washington D.C. where I was frequently the accidental techie who had to solve tech problems without really much tech expertise. So I'm happy to be your host today having gone through the process of selecting CRMs for those organizations and managing data and constituent info and advocacy data and all kinds of stuff trying to figure out how to manage that. So hopefully between the two of us you'll get a good amount of expertise for yourself to walk away and make a good decision for your organization's needs. You'll also see on the back end assisting with the chat, Ali Bazdikian who is an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup. And she will be on hand to help grab your questions, and she'll also be there to help you with any audio issues if you have them. A quick look at our agenda today. I'll do a brief introduction of TechSoup in case you're not familiar with who we are. We'll have an opportunity for you to tell us a little bit about what matters most to you when it comes to CRMs and managing your constituents. We'll talk a bit about what is CRM, what makes it up, and how they can be differently packaged, or how you can find them. And then David's going to talk about the four strategies, and he'll dig deep on each of those. And then we'll get a little introduction to Netsuite.org which is one of the products that's available through TechSoup's catalog as a recent donor partner. So we want to make sure you know about the opportunities available there. And then we'll have an opportunity for Fuller Q&A. Like I said throughout the webinar we'll take questions here and there so feel free to put them in as they come to you. So who is TechSoup? We are a 501c3 nonprofit. And our goal is to help nonprofits, charities, public libraries, foundations, and churches with tech products and services and the learning resources to make informed decisions. And that would include things like today's webinar. We want to make these events available to you for free so that you can have the information you need to best serve your needs. We've been around since 1987 helping more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. And before I started working for TechSoup I was a member and user of TechSoup services at all three of those small nonprofits. And we have a variety of new things available through this organization today including things like consulting services, Windows 8.1, and QuickBooks 2014. Those are just a few of the new things that you can find at TechSoup.org that might be of interest to your organization. And you can feel free to visit us at TechSoup.org as I mentioned. So that's enough of the commercial for TechSoup. I'm going to go ahead and move us on to the topic at hand today about CRM. And so this next slide is a poll that we'd like you to take a moment and think about which of the following is most important or most true for your organization's needs. We only have it able to allow you to select one. And if one of these is not your most highest priority, feel free to chat into us what is. But these are some of the strategies that we're going to be talking about and how selecting a CRM can really make a big difference depending on which of these you choose. So is it most important to you to know and be able to store who you know and know what they said and how we communicated with them? Is it most important to be able to know how your constituents interact with each other and with you? Is it most important to know which users bring the most value, whether that be in connection strategically or whether that's in monetary value, donations? Or is it most important to you to have a flexible CRM infrastructure that can change with your needs over time and that might need to be able to do all of these things at different times? Select which one is most important. And if there's something else you want to let us know feel free to chat that into us so we can consider that too. I'm going to give you a few more seconds to participate in the poll by clicking on your screen. And this will help inform us live during this webinar so we know what our audience is most valuing in the needs of a CRM. And then David is going to go ahead and take over to give us more background on what CRM is and what those strategies are that you can move forward with. So I'm going to close this in just a few seconds. Peggy comments that they need another donor management system, which I guess could somewhat be knowing which users bring the most value and being able to track sort of their value and contributions. Sarah comments, it's also important to be able to run analytical reports that show the effectiveness of our outreach methods. So being able to measure your own effectiveness and running reports and extracting reports, great. So I'm going to go ahead and show the results and you should be seeing some of this. But about 40% of our participants have said that knowing who we know and what we said to them is really important and followed closely by having that flexible infrastructure to change with your needs. We also have a few other comments coming in saying my needs are a combination of the first and third options. So yeah, we limited it to one choice here just because we wanted to see what really was the most important. But we understand that a lot of these may have multiple needs. We also have Andrea commenting that we need something that handles ticketing and fundraising as well, a true 360. And Eric comments with multiple databases accounting warehouse volunteer. We're looking one for one ring to rule them all. Wouldn't we all like that? One ring to rule all of them. So I'm going to go ahead and invite our presenter who can help us figure out is there one ring to rule them all? David, welcome to the program. We're so glad to have you join us. Thank you very much Becky. And thanks everybody for joining me today. And yeah, everybody wants one ring to rule them all, but that was a work of fiction, unfortunately. Awesome, sad. I'm going to go ahead and just put it on your opening slide. And feel free to give us a little bit more of your background as well and your experience, kind of where you come from in this conversation. Perfect. So my name is David Guile, I run Corporate Citizenship for NetSuite. NetSuite is a big software company and quite frankly we're trying to build the one ring that rules them all. But the reality of what people do every day and how they implement software is something that I've been working with for the last 20 years exclusively in nonprofit technologies. And from there, one of the biggest things you learn is the technology is not the biggest driver of how these things work. It's the strategy that works. And so what I wanted to do today was really just kind of lay out four nonprofit strategies. They kind of build on one another and are related to one another and give people the lay of the land for how to deal with CRM. So the first thing is to get us all on a common definition of CRM. So the definition that I like the best is an institutional memory about interactions with all constituents that is used to further your mission. And you see a little blue circle there and a little orange circle there. CRM means different things to different people. So oftentimes in a donor database kind of context you're worried about who are you my prospects? Who are the people that I'm going to ask for money? How do I relate to them? And then once they commit to giving me money, that's kind of the end of the cycle. You'll see that that's kind of weed and prospect. Again, most CRMs are kind of built out of the business context, so we use some of those terms. But qualify, meet, those are all your interactions. You're tracking meetings, calls with people. But then there's no other side of CRM. When you think of your clients, you think of if you're an advocacy organization relating to folks, you want them to take action. You want to provide them with services. You want to do follow-ups and see what happens. And so I like this definition that kind of allows you to get a decision for yourself about what's the most important here and where are your needs? Because everybody's needs are different in this space which is just a 100% truth. So I just wanted to give people a sign of kind of what CRMs are. The simplest CRM, just keep track of a list of people would be Google Contacts. I've got my list of people. I can keep my addresses in there. If you're using something like Google Apps, you can have a shared contact list across your organization. So there's a single version of the truth. And then you go off to the other end and these are screenshots from NetSuite. And with that you have lots of activities. You can record phone calls. You can record events and tasks and files and send communications out directly from the system. You have analytical capabilities. You can provide key performance indicators on what's happening. You can actually import data directly from web forms into your CRM and then take action on them. You can have reminders. So there's a more sophisticated view of what's happening. And usually in those sophisticated systems you have one dashboard to tell you all the things that are going on with that donor. All the interactions across the organization, all the interactions with the client, whatever it happens to be. So that's kind of a spectrum from simple to complex. And then you have to also ask yourself, where's my organization in the spectrum from simple to complex? And I like this little chart because it gives you a pretty nice way of kind of evaluating yourself. So the bottom axis is the number of data repositories. Most organizations have post-it notes and spreadsheets and databases and all kinds of different things. So if you have a lot of repositories you're kind of on the left side. If you've actually consolidated the holy grail of a single place where all your information is, then you're kind of on the right-hand side. The other axis is the value of those interactions you have with your constituents. So do you have a really regular way that you communicate with every donor or with every client? Is it highly thought out? Is there a campaign calendar? Well then you're kind of on the top end of that. If you just say, oh, I think it's time to send the donor a newsletter. And did we send one last month? I don't remember. Then you're probably on the lower end. Most organizations kind of move from constituent chaos to constituent set trick. That's where they're trying to go. It's fairly unusual for folks to be kind of in the blue squares there. And so one of the ways they get on that path is by employing a strategy. So I just wanted to see if there were any questions about that first section that were in the chat. We haven't had anything come in that's specific to that, but I would welcome people to chat in which quadrant their organization might be in now. So if you have an idea of where you might fit, feel free to let us know because I think that is a really helpful quadrant to look at that chart. Fantastic. And the other slides will be available through the link so you can kind of go through because I'm going to move a lot of content so I'll move fairly quickly. So one of the things we always try to remind people with CRM is it all starts with strategy. And there's a reason for this. So most people say, hey, I need CRM to solve my problem. What problem does CRM solve? Well, it really depends and what kind of CRM, and it's a big space. So you have to figure out what your strategy is before you can even start talking about the technology. And so the big question you ask yourself to determine strategy or one is how do you work with and or serve your constituents? So who are my constituents? And what do I really want? What do I do with them? And what's important for me to keep track of? What's the most important part of your mission vis-a-vis constituents? So if you're an advocacy organization, getting them to call their congressman might be the most important thing you're doing. If you're serving homeless clients, getting them a bed, the right night that they need it is the most important thing you're doing. It will be unique for every organization. And then what critical organizational or business processes involve your constituents? So when you look at what people do every day, what they spend their time on, what are the really critical pieces that involve your constituents? And then there are some general problems that CRM solves. Tends to provide that institutional memory piece. It tends to start to solve the disconnected data silos, but you can have two disconnected CRM systems and still create silos. And it tends to create a complete view of the constituent. But one of the things that can get you in trouble really quickly is starting to hear all the cool things that CRM can do. And there are endless possibilities that can do all kinds of things. And quite frankly figure out your strategy first, then figure out which features are relevant to the strategy, and basically completely ignore all the other features that aren't relevant to the strategy. Because the space is so big and it's so confusing, you need something to organize yourself. So we're going to talk about four CRM strategies. And the ones that I have laid out kind of build upon one another. And almost no organization just has one strategy. They do a little bit of kind of everything. So the folks on the call, you know, roughly the dominant folks were the contacts there at the bottom. I'm just starting out. And the silos, I'm sorry, the contacts at the top, silos at the bottom, silos tends to be much more sophisticated organizations. So it sounds like we have on the call today both sides. But the problem that the contact strategy solves is we just need to know who we know. And the classic version is I have to go over to the executive director's office and look at their post-it notes to figure out who the important donors are this week. I have to walk over to the other building to look at the client services database to see which clients were really important. Relationships takes it another level. It's trying to understand how the constituents interact with us. Again in fundraising that's going to be a lot more of who's the program officer of this foundation that we're going to go talk to? Who is related to whom? Is somebody on a congressional staff person for advocacy? The examples are kind of all over the place. But it's really about I've got two constituents in my database and I need to know how they interact with one another. The third one is money and revenue. And there's really two versions of this. There's the donor database version of this which is I just need to know who's going to generate the most revenue so I can pursue my mission. But then another version of this that's not often thought about is the expense side of this. So this is one of the client management side. So my constituents are receiving services from me. Which of my constituents are the most expensive or the least expensive to serve? And so where's the most bang for my buck? And then finally whether you need an infrastructure to accommodate changing needs and multiple dynamic CRM strategies, that's where you kind of get into the silos space. And that is again more sophisticated, more effort on your part. And a lot of people will start slow and move through these phases. The other kind of common statement I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page with is what it means to implement a CRM. And the first piece of this is a CRM really isn't about software. It's not turning on software and putting data in. The first part is to find your strategy. The second part is document and improve your process. So if your process is to walk over to your executive director's office and look at the post-it notes on their wall, that's probably not a process that you want to automate. You probably want to improve the process. The executive director puts the information in one place, you put the information in one place, everybody looks in that one place to get the information. This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with software. So folks that get afraid of technology, these are pieces of paper that you can write down on the back of an envelope. It can be two dot points in an email. It doesn't have to be big fancy documents that you paid a whole lot of money to consultants to do. But you do have to do the steps. The third step is then once you kind of know what process you're going to automate, then you want to put it in the software. And then that's the software piece. Now you've got to go actually test it. Does it work? Usually it doesn't work the first time around. You revise it a couple of times until it's acceptable, and then you launch it and you have everybody use the process. So that is what implementing a CRM is, and it's very little about software. Now the folks that then want to know what the software piece is, that's the second piece here. So it's one that's kind of identifying all the data in that example with the executive director and the post-it notes. Hey, the post-it note has the name and the address and the phone number on it. Great. So now there's my data that I need. Where's the data today? It's spread all over the place. Get it into one location. Make sure when you put new data in, it's a standard process. And then you want to configure the software to match the process that you need. Now this is a really, really important point in any type of software, but CRM especially. The more you conform to your software, the less time and money you'll spend. A lot of people like to document their process and hear somebody like me say, oh, don't worry about the software part of this. And then they want their software to exactly conform what they kind of created out of the blue sky. That is an expensive process. It's possible to do, but it's expensive. So if you conform to the software that solves your problem, again, you know the strategy doesn't solve my problem, then you're going to be much, much better off than kind of just accepting it. And only you can make the decision about whether the customization is so valuable to you that you're willing to spend the time and effort to do it. Finally, load your data. And then by the way, one of the reasons everybody uses post-it notes is when you stick a post-it note up on the wall, that's your reporting. You don't have to think about how you get your data out of where you just put it. But they're on the wall. Never forget your reporting and make sure you can get the data out from where you are. All right, if there are no other queries there, I'm going to kind of drill into some of these detailed strategies. So the first one is contacts. You know really the story here is I'm a small organization with limited resources and I just need to get organized. The most common version of this is actually a larger organization that may have tried once or twice and had a difficulty. And then they realized they need to kind of start from step one of the ladder to both the strategy fits in kind of both cases. The challenges that that strategy tends to address is one, you just can't find anything. One survey a few years back found that 50% of nonprofits use post-its in Excel as their primary data storage. And I don't think it's changed much. If you can't make a list of constituents, if you ask yourself, who are we going to invite to the event next week? And it's 4 hours worth of meetings and 10 Excel sheets, then that's probably a problem that the contact strategy is aligned to. And everything is out of date or long. So I got five addresses, who knows which one is really the right one. So that's the contact strategy kind of in a nutshell. There's a couple of things in the contact strategy that are really important. So there's the features of the software that are important to this and then there's kind of the implications for implementation. So the features, the first one that is kind of key is this multi-user anytime anywhere access. So if you are sitting next to the executive director's office walking into their room to look at their post-its is not that big of a deal. But if you're a multi-site agency across three states, what are you going to do? Fly to the executive director's office to go look at the post-its on their wall? It's just impossible. So you need to have some kind of multi-user access. The other piece which is available now but not necessarily required by the strategy is this anytime anywhere access. I can look at this at my desk. I can look at this at home. I can look at this as I'm walking out of a meeting with the constituent and record the fact that we just met on my mobile phone. So cloud-based modern solutions tend to start solving most of those problems without looking at it. The other three features are really obvious, right? I need to be able to enter my constituents. I need to be able to search them, and I need to be able to list them. Don't think that the obvious requirements are really good things to see in software. Some systems may require entry in one way or another, search in one way or another. There might be limits in listing in one way or another. You really have to see these things to see if they fit. Finally, the implementation implications of the contact strategy is nice thing is the planning and process, the amount of time you're spending thinking about this stuff is actually minimal. It's a lot of simple writing, a lot of simple decisions. Generally these systems you just kind of turn them on and start typing. It's good to have an accidental techie on staff. Accidental techies are usually that person that you say, hey, you like computers. We're going to make you responsible for all the office computers. And they're like, I'm a social worker and I have a full-time job already. But those folks on your staff are helpful, but they're not necessary. And there's generally no need for paid consultants to do this. But that does have, again, good and bad sides. So if you go through this, you get the good, one source of the truth, one organizational contact list. Staff starts to get used to databases. Don't ever underestimate how many people will hold on to their Excel spreadsheets for years and years and years, even after you give them a database. They get used to databases and potentially become ready for more later. But the limitations is, one of the big limitations of it is the last one there, you just can't really prepare for the future. The nice thing about it though is moving up isn't really very hard because you've done the basics. So I'm just going to kind of turn to the next strategy here. So David, I had one person that had commented saying that one of their biggest challenges with the contacts kind of strategy is that they find that importing contacts is just so much typing that it is in itself a really laborious process. Is there a way or are there tips or tricks on how to get contact info into a usable state without having to just type and type and type and type? Any tips on that? So there's a couple of things. So the two kind of features that relate to that that you would look for are things usually gets called CSV upload but it basically means you can type everything into Excel and then just import it. And that will definitely require at least an accidental techie on your staff who understands data to make that work smoothly. The second one is rather than you typing it, have your constituents type it. So look for solutions, and usually this is called a web form. So you want a system that will allow you to put up a web form, have your constituents type their information, have it go directly in the database, and then basically what you end up doing is fixing all the errors your constituents put into your data. They miscapitalized their names, they did whatever. That said, maintaining data requires time. There's no magic bullet, you just need time. And that's the time that your staff is going to invest. All right, so I'm going to move on to relationships here. And if there are any other questions, please type them in the chat box. We will respond to everything at least offline. So the relationship strategy is really, I need to know about my constituents, their inner relationships, and their activities that drive my mission. Now these strategies build upon one another, right? So I might need both contacts and relationships. Usually you need all these things once you get to the higher levels anyway. The challenges that this strategy, the best example for this strategy is really those politics and advocacy space where whom you know and whom the people you know know are incredibly important to your mission. So the challenges it solves are I can't take action based on the constituents' relationships. Hey, these guys are on the board of a funder. They should look at my proposal before I send it in. I can't take advantage of new technology like social media. One of the things that happens in social media is it's very relationship based. So can I get this constituent to send out my message because they know lots of people that I want my message to go out to? I can't respond to constituents in a timely manner. So going back to them client service models, you don't know what relationships your organization has with your constituents. So people get lost up in the shuffle. There's missed follow-ups, dropped communication, that type of thing. So there's a couple of features and implications for this strategy. The features that are really important, and this is something that you actually don't see in a lot of CRM systems, is the concept of arbitrary relationships between constituents. A lot of times you'll be able to manage, you know, I'm the employee of NetSuite or my wife Michelle is my spouse even though our last names are different. But it doesn't necessarily allow you to do arbitrary relationships which are relationships that might be important to your mission, that might be unique to your organization. The other feature that's important in this space is tracking the activities and communications. What is the email trail that I've had with this? How many times have we called this constituent over the last 24 hours? How many different people in the organization talk to them about the same thing? Wow, that must have been very frustrating. I'm not going to go call them and talk to them about the same thing again. And then look for specific support for specific relationships. And events is kind of the best example and I know in the chat screen somebody had mentioned events systems. Events have a very specific process. They have a very specific relationship. So you want to look for specific support for those things rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. The implementation implications for this is suddenly the planning and process now moves up. I can't write on the back of an envelope. I actually have to have a few meetings with staff. I maybe have to write a couple pages of business process there. They always require some technical implementation and you want to have staff and capacity in your organization that is technical. They can be accidental techies that kind of understand what's going on. And if your process is particularly complex, it means you're going to go to paid consultants. So what do you get from this strategy? You get that personalized constituent experience. You get sense of intimacy with your constituents because basically if the executive director just had a phone call with somebody and now you're on the phone with them, you can say, hey, I know you talked to so-and-so last week. Did that with that conversation productive or do we need to follow up on something? That creates a sense of intimacy with people that is very different from. I just talked to you guys last week about this exact same thing which sets up an 8-8 conflict bubble. Your broader audience can be mobilized for your mission. So you can actually look in your database and mobilize one person because you know that they have the relationships with a lot of other people and you will get an expanded reach. Things don't fall through the cracks because you're tracking activity. If I promised that my executive director is going to meet with you, I assigned a task and I followed up with a task and the task has a deadline. Limitations though are that you must have an organizational commitment to the process and the tools. Most CRM strategies fall down because nobody really takes the time to figure out the processes. And once it's written down, nobody really follows the process. And once you deploy the tool, nobody really uses the tool. Software can't help solve any of those problems for you. Can't track other implications there that I think are most important are if you put garbage into a database, you will get garbage out. And this goes back to the typing piece. There's going to be a lot of typing. There's going to be duplicate checking. There's going to be all these things. And you minimize the amount of time you put in there but you plan for those. Now one of the things that can happen as you go through a strategy like this, if you don't have kind of the broader view, it can create silos. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. It may make perfect sense to get that event system and have that as a new silo just because you're at the stage of an organization where you're just trying to use these systems effectively. We had one question that came in, David, that was specifically referencing a couple of slides ago asking, can you explain arbitrary relationships between constituents a little bit more? Can you expand on what kind of relationships are in an arbitrary that you might want to track? Yeah, so basically imagine two constituents in your organization, board member and another board member. Their relationship might be they both sit on the audit committee. I'm just making stuff up so it could be almost anything. That's why we use the word arbitrary. One person who is a congressperson and their staffer. If you're an advocacy organization, it's really important to know who the staffers are for the congressional staffers. So that's an arbitrary relationship for you is who's the congressional staff of this person. In a donor context spouse. So you can imagine this is almost anything. Just pick two constituents in your world to find the relationship and that is an arbitrary relationship. That's helpful. So if you have chapters or affiliates and a chapter leader happens to be friends with one of your board members, then that relationship might be useful to actually know about and be able to track. So that's helpful to have some clarity on that. We had another question that came in. The hardest strategy though is might be useful to track does not mean you should track it. Absolutely unconditionally part of our process and we always track it and it's critical to our mission means we track it. Might means we put it on a piece of paper and ignore it until we have the basics done. Gotcha. That's good advice. Julie asked one question as well just clarifying saying she joined a few minutes late but what is a silo? Can you talk a little bit about what silo is? Silo is often you have two databases and so you have an events database and you have a donor database. And in the events database there's one address and in the donor database there's another address. That's a consequence of a silo. Great, that's helpful. I think we can move on. We have a couple of other questions but I think they're broader so we'll hold those for a little bit. Great. I'm going to move on here to kind of a money revenue strategy. This is really where your constituents are the source of your revenue and you need to maximize revenue and or minimize costs. So direct mail runs this way. Grants runs this way. Do I just scatter shot LOIs or do I know that certain LOIs are going to, letters of intent that I send to foundations. Certain letters of intent that I send to foundations are going to be more likely to generate money for me or not. Membership, who's most likely to renew their membership or not renew their membership. So it's really about the money side. And so the challenges there are, I don't know who my best donors are. I can't really steward high touch relationships. The classic one is a major donor program and so I identify this guy is incredibly valuable to me so I'm going to pay extra attention to him. But if you can't identify that they're valuable to you then you have to pay attention to everybody and that doesn't really work. And I can't determine the ROI of proposed action or innovation. ROI means return on investment. So if I spend $5,000 on this event or $5,000 on this campaign but it only brought in $2,000, basically I just lost $3,000. So that had a negative ROI. So the money revenue strategy kind of drives to those challenges. The features that are there is the key one is tracking transactions. So I need to track those donations. I need to track services offering. I need to track expenses. You're going to need the pre-built reports. You want to look for those reports already there. You don't want somebody to say, oh yeah, you can do that. Customize it because unless you have the internal capacity to customize it that may not make sense. You're looking for dashboards and key performance indicators. This is features that bring data to you in real time. So let's say if I looked at my screen I had a dashboard and it showed me every time I got a donation over $5,000, it pops up on the screen. That's kind of a dashboard or a KPI concept. And then flexible reporting for the end user. So a lot of times ROI is going to be very specific to your organization. So somebody in your organization needs to look at the information and be able to manipulate it to make a decision. That's flexible reporting. Generally the planning and process that you have to do as an organization are medium to high. So you may be spending weeks in conference rooms and writing lots of documentation to figure these things out. Fundraising is the most common instance of this. So you should look at pre-built fundraising solutions. So you don't have to spend all that planning and process time and you just conform to the pre-built fundraising solution. You will definitely need paid consultants and you'll definitely need accidental techies because a lot of people think that paying consultant will solve their problem for them. Paying the consultant gets the system up. It doesn't mean you know how to use it or you can support your organization in using it. So going to the good, I actually can track actual and projected ROI which means I can now take actions that are the best stewards of my donor money. I can deliver an optimal constituent experience. So in the relationships mode, I might be really good at following up with everybody but I might be spending huge amounts following up with everybody whereas I only should be following up with the people who need the follow-up. A lot of times when you bring in the transactional information you can then target that constituent experience. These guys need a great constituent experience. These guys just need good customer service. Limitations in this space are again the organizational commitment to the process and tool is huge. You will definitely need some internal data analysis and reporting capacity. Somebody needs to use a tool. If you don't train people on the tool then you are pretty much out of luck. And then the two others that we already talked about. So we had one question that was specifically related to donors. So I'm going to ask it here and we have a couple of others that I'll hold for the bigger Q&A in a few minutes. So Sharon asks, I'm looking for a way to track donors to send thank you letters to them as well as in honor or in memory of letters to the family or to the person that a donation is made for. Will a CRM help her do that? Or is she looking for something different? A CRM will help you do that. However, this goes back to my kind of point about these are common fundraising processes so you are better off looking at a donor management system. So if you are a small organization I recommend going to the IdealWare site and downloading their low cost guide to low cost donor management systems report. The whole big report gives you all the things and tells you whether they can send in honor letters and things like that, and at least defines the space for you. But that's a great example of there is a process. Somebody built software to do it already. Don't take a general CRM and try to make it do that because quite frankly it might be more effort than it's worth. All right, I'm going to move on to silos and then we'll get to some of the bigger Q&A. So silos, the strategy here is my information about constituencies is spread across systems that don't share data well and we need a complete view of the constituent. Basically what happens is that event system doesn't talk with your CRM and then everybody started storing information and outlook and now you've got outlook in your CRM and your event system and who knows what the address is. In that report I mentioned earlier over half of nonprofits manage four or more repositories of siloed data so it's very, very common. And sometimes it's a good reason. Doing consolidated data sources may actually not be financially viable but only you can figure out what your strategy is, figure out what that process is that's critical to your mission, and then figure out if breaking down that silo really serves your mission or not. And then the other kind of challenge that solves is, okay I need to do an event list for the event next week. Five different staffers go to five different databases and get all their spreadsheets together and then they put them in a conference room and they merge their spreadsheets together and then they try to de-dupe them and da-da-da-da-da-da. And now I have the invite list for the event. Very error-prone, very problematic. If you consolidated your silos you may be able to lower the staff time required to do that by orders of magnitude. So what are the features that you need to kind of start looking at both siloed systems? You need role-based systems, means the executive director sees something different from the data entry clerk. You need a platform that supports customization and provides APIs. You need to provide segmentation. So the customization API is not even going to explain, just you know, that's kind of a deeper technical term, but if you have these sophisticated needs make sure to check box and then ask your accidental techie to dig in deeper. Segmentation is really the ability to say, okay, which donors from Florida gave me more than $5,000? Which constituents that we provided this service to have a good experience? Being able to take that big list of constituents and pull out a very small slice that meets criteria, that's segmentation. And usually you want to look for systems that are scalable from small to very, very large. Not that you necessarily need very, very large, but if they support very, very large they probably have a lot of the features that you might need to solve the settling problems. In implementation you are going to spend a lot of time planning. You are going to spend a lot of time putting data from multiple places into one place, which is expensive and requires specialized help. You are going to have a tendency to avoid pre-built stand-alones solutions. So pre-built solutions, fundraising events, etc. that talk to one another, those are fine. But if they are stand-alone, if they create silos you need to avoid them which tends to mean that it requires a little bit more technical capacity on your side. And you are definitely going to use paid consultants. And you are definitely not going to rely exclusively on them to kind of fix the problem for you. All right, so the good, you've got this future-proof platform that's magical and that's marketing speak, but it is true to a certain extent. You've got your 360-degree view of the constituent, as long as everybody puts the right data in the system. No one, nothing falls through the cracks. That's all wonderful. That level of good comes at a cost. So if you are a small organization and that contacts goal, strategy is really yours, don't convince yourself and get hoodwinked by all the features that you need to kind of solve this silos problem. Limitations is what I just said, takes a lot of effort for an organization to actually implement. So no other questions. I'm going to do a very brief net-sweet.org commercial and then we are going to go straight into the Q&A. So I always warn people when they get the commercial. So what is net-sweet.org? We are the corporate citizenship arm of NetSuite. We are a publicly-traded software company. We are the leading provider of cloud-based financial and ERP software, basically accounting and keeping track of things that go through. Our founder had this vision. When we deliver software to our 20,000 customers, they generally become more profitable. They make more money. That's really awesome. What happens if we do that in a homeless shelter? The outcome is something that is a little bit more meaningful. So we do product donations. We have a very large pro bono program because we can give away software but we don't really actually care about the giving away part. We care about people using it effectively. So we need to provide volunteers pro bono to kind of help them do that. It doesn't mean there aren't also paid consultants in our ecosystem. And then we also have a social solutions program because we have this big platform. What it means is we need to build those solutions, events management, donor management for the nonprofit sector. So we are in the ideal where donor management systems report. We have solutions for fund accounting, donor management, grant accounting, etc. We distribute our products through TechSoup and we have about 400 grantees that use our stuff. The thing about our donation program is we always give a base donation that is free, no cost forever. For a small organization you use the software. That includes 5 licenses, the complete system, support, and training. If you go beyond those 5 licenses I need 100 license. You either get a 50% or an 80% discount depending on the size of your organization. If your organization is under 5 million in revenue you get that 80% discount. So you get the products on TechSoup. This is our little page on TechSoup. And we have 3 products, and I'm just going to go through them really quickly. We have Coronet Suite, and so I'm looking at this top left hand side there. There's more details about the donation section there. But it does accounting, it does fundraising, inventory, project management, e-commerce, time sheet, and expenses. It is appropriate for folks that are probably pursuing the silo strategy. It has been successful with folks that pursue the contact strategy, but it's probably overkill for that level of strategy. So that's NetSuite, one of the products we donate. That's the big kind of mothership. The second product we donate is Tribe HR. And that's your core employee record doing your performance assessments, doing applicant tracking, having an online job board. Again, for a small agency with 10 employees, it's completely free. It's free. We renew the donation every year. So as long as you keep using it, it's still free. Same discount structure. And then the last product that we donate is Lights of the MS, which is a basic content management system website and online store solution. And you can see all of that in our page on TechSoup with that. Thank you, Becky. Thank you, thank you, David. So I have a quick screenshot of just one of the product pages where you can see the NetSuite CRM offer for an initial one-year subscription. And you see that it has a $300 admin fee, and that's paid to TechSoup. And that's part of helping us maintain our operating costs as well. But you can learn more about them, and we'll include links in that follow-up. So I'm going to go ahead and get us to questions since we have quite a few. So we had a bunch of questions come in earlier, and here's one from William that's kind of related to the same thing. How do you educate an executive director who just doesn't get it around the need for a CRM, and then get them to actually use it? So adoption was a big issue. Do you have any suggestions on how to get your staff to get on board and buy in? So that is the $64 million question. Now isn't it? So there's a couple of things. If you follow the strategy process, and if you get your executive director talking about the mission, and thinking about what people do all day, that's the process piece. And you confront your executive director with the fact that the people spend 10 hours to do something that's really, really critical to the mission. But you know, technology applied to that 10 hours might make it into an hour. What could they do with the other 9 hours? And that's where you just leave that question hanging for the executive director to answer. Because then they'll start thinking, oh wow, so my intake people might be able to do more community outreach. Maybe they'll be able to visit a site. Maybe they'll come up with all kinds of cool things that they want to do, because that's what executive directors do. And so you've now hooked them on the case that technology will solve this problem. Now the risk though is if you really look at technology projects, about 50% of them fail. And that's because it's very hard to get everybody to adopt the new process and to realize the promise of that converting that 10 hour task into a 1 hour task. But you really hook senior staff on the potential and what the organization can do if they could just get out of the busy work. Great. And I think that also speaks to choosing a CRM strategy that works for you instead of necessarily going with the biggest, most bells and whistles option because I imagine those are much more work to actually set up and get people to use. So we had a handful of questions around cloud-based or local. So is NetSuite a cloud-based tool or is it a locally installed tool? And can you speak to the security and sort of encryption of cloud-based CRMs? Sure. So NetSuite is a cloud-based tool. All of our tools are cloud-based which all it means is you need a web browser to access it. That's all you need. No servers, don't need to worry about security, don't need to know anything about that stuff. For an organization like NetSuite, we spend far more than our biggest customers which are giant corporations could ever spend to keep their system secure. And so even though people often think, wow, I can see the server and it's right under my executive director's desk and the door is locked at night and that's got to be secure, right? Well, did you think about your Wi-Fi network? So in the modern world for established companies that have large amounts of revenue and large amounts of customers, you're better off the security that those organizations can provide are better than the security you can provide. Does that mean there will not be a breach? No. Even we just saw with Target, giant corporation huge resources couldn't keep very important stuff secure. But the likelihood of there being a breach with a reputable provider is much lower. So with our cloud-based system, client servers is pretty much dead. I think you can make arguments about it, but at this point it's a moot point because the world has already passed the server under the desk. That's a good point. It does seem like everything is moving that way. We have somebody asking, can you describe in more detail why with the money or revenue strategy, why that would require a paid consultant, why somebody couldn't do that with an accidental techie or somebody just on staff? Sure. So I kind of set the most common scenarios on the slides. So I have seen all volunteer organizations with volunteer technical resources do an effective silo strategy and have it work fine. However, if you tell people that, then their eyes get bigger than their mouth. Or their stomach, right? Isn't that the saying? And so they think, oh, somebody else did it. We must be able to do it. Well, there's a lot of dynamics that are internal to your organization that will determine whether you feel like you're more capable than the midpoint nonprofit or less capable than the midpoint nonprofit. So my recommendations there are all around the fact that the paid consultant will likely keep you in the room for more hours than you will keep yourself in the room. They will likely write a longer process document than you yourself would write and therefore are more likely to keep you on to kind of the minimum level of detail required to be successful. Great. One last question before we wrap up. We have a few we haven't answered and we'll make sure to follow up, excuse me, by email directly with you after. But we had a question asking, to what extent can NetSuite be customized and extended? So NetSuite is a, we have a full pass platform. The acronym is a platform as a service. Which means people have built extremely complex applications. The heart of NetSuite is a financial transaction. So people have built warehouse management systems, manufacturing and resource planning systems. Very, very complex software systems on top of our platform. So we, and we are currently doing a lot of things in client management, outcomes management, grants management that are unique in the sector. So it is extremely customizable. For the audience here that kind of reported out that 42% were focused on the contact strategy, just pretend you didn't hear what I just said because you really want to focus on the basics and not worry about the customization because as you move to kind of more customization it requires more capacity on your organization's part to maintain it. But it is an incredibly powerful and attractive thing if you have the internal capacity to manage it. So somebody might want to start with the contacts option and then may build on that later down the road and might be able to have the options within a CRM to expand on it. I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up. We have a bunch of questions we haven't been able to get to so we'll make sure to follow up with you after. You can also join us in our community forums where you can see this address, techsoup.org slash community, and post your questions for our experts to answer on the forums. We also have other webinars coming up including one next Thursday at the same time, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern on how to get tech donations through TechSoup including the Netsuite offers that we discussed today. So thank you so much everybody for joining us. Thank you David for sharing your expertise on these strategies. I hope that people are able to capture something that will help them make a good decision for their organization. And we'll share links to those reports that were mentioned in the follow-up email. I'd also like to thank Alia Bestikian for her help on the back end in managing chat questions. And I'd like to last thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for the use of their platform to provide these webinars for you on a weekly basis. You can also learn more about their donation program at techsoup.org slash readytalk. Please take a moment when the webinar has closed to complete the post-event survey. Your feedback helps us continue to improve our webinar program. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific day.