 Hello, and welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffith and today's webinar is Harness the Power of Your Data with CRM. I am joined by Dean Graham from Empower Pennsylvania. Welcome, Dean. Thank you. Glad to be here. So can you tell us a little bit about Empower and what you do there? Oh, sure. I am Senior Manager of Application Services for Empower PA. Empower was started in Seattle, not coincidentally the home of Microsoft where they had a lot of donations of technology and really didn't know what to do with them. So Empower is a nonprofit that helps nonprofits with technology. We have 12 affiliates around the country. I'm located in Pennsylvania. My job really is to work with and manage projects that are very traditional consulting type projects, but they are really trying to bring nonprofits up a level. And they include things like strategic technology planning, business continuity, CRM development, and application selection, things like that. Excellent. Thank you so much. And quickly I'm the Training and Outreach Manager here at TechSoup. I've been a part of TechSoup for about 3 ½ years and I managed the webinar program and really fortunate to be able to talk to really smart people like Dean every week. And I'd also like to thank Becky Wiegand and Stephanie Parker for helping out on the chat. Stephanie is our new intern and she'll also be live tweeting about this event. So I'm going to move on to the agenda. So in the next 40 minutes or so we're going to talk about what CRM is, the benefits, what to include in your database. And Dean will tell us 3 examples of organizations that he knows about and has worked with. We'll talk about how do you get started, thinking about choosing a tool, and then once you've chosen the tool, how do you keep people using it? So then here we go with the poll. So I'll take a second, about 15, 20 seconds here. Please select one of these that applies to your group. And you can choose as many as applies. So I know some of you might be using several different options, choose as many, and then hit submit. I'm going to watch as the numbers increase here and give you enough time to respond. I guess I could have included the category. I'm not quite sure. I don't know. I don't know. I don't think we're doing anything. It's all in my head still. Actually that would have been a good one. Okay, going once, going twice, and I'm going to close the poll. All right, look at that. Spreadsheets win by a long shot. But it's interesting to see some of the – I guess it would be interesting to hear of the other category. If those of you who selected that wouldn't mind chatting in what the other is, I won't read your name off. You will be anonymous. Someone says, ACT, Everbright, Outlook, Word documents, SQL Server. Great. Constant contact right on. A lot of people using Outlook and custom legacy software. Giftworks, great. Let's just get started into talking about what is CRM. Okay, well, great. First of all, thanks to Kimmy and TechSoup for having me and for all of you for joining us here today. Really one of the reasons I've been involved in this in nonprofits and CRMs for so long is obviously serve the nonprofit ideal. And we all know here the better our data, the better the story we can tell. We know of nonprofits that have sort of great heart-wrenching stories, and I've worked with some of them. Some of us have really good stories, but if we can back it up with some really good data, that allows us to go to funders and or our donors and really work to receive our message. So that's really one of the sort of fundamental principles about this whole ideal. And as we've moved forward, this whole new thing called CRM has sort of been brought to the forefront, and it's something that has a real sort of natural fit for nonprofits. What is not natural is traditionally the C normally stands for customer. And in the nonprofit world, really we have clients or other things. And so I generally use the word constituent. And that is meant to cover really all of the different people we deal with. So in a CRM, who are our constituents? And very often nonprofits are looking at databases to just track their donors. And I really feel that it's very important, and there's great advantage to us to look to all of the people that we deal with, and we interact with all of our constituents. So we can have board numbers, volunteers, clients, staff, media, and people pre-stage and post-stage in our workflow. And very often these people may even have more than just one hat. They may wear multiple hats. And this is where some of the benefits to CRM really come around. So if we had a person that maybe volunteered once for a year, gave you $50 or $25 bucks or somebody that came to a lecture or even was provided one of your services individually, that person or people would not necessarily, they are obviously important to all of us, but they would not be someone that you would maybe look to try to increase a relationship with. But if someone is doing all of these things, if we can capture information to all of them and relate them all to a single person, now that person clearly sort of gets the mission of your organization. And it's someone we want to cultivate a relationship with and bring them further into the organization. So that's one of the reasons we want to look at where people are wearing these hats and what these multiple hats are all about. So when we get to the R in CRM, we're talking about the relationship. For years we've been able to capture contacts, whether it's an act or access or spreadsheets, we can put down somebody's name and their phone number, and that really only is data. It's dead to us really without understanding what the person's relationship, what have they done with us? Well in some cases in the spreadsheet we may put down that they gave us $20 and we have that line, and then next year we put down a line that they gave us $20 again, but we really can't see the fullness and the richness of that relationship. One of the things that we want to do is also build that relationship. So we not only want to track what someone's interactions with us are, whether it's emails, donations, volunteering, coming to workshops or events, but we want to be able to build that. We want to bring them further into the fold and maybe make a $50 donor, $100 donor, or a volunteer, a board member. So one of the ways we do that sort of as humans, when you get together with your old college roommate, you're invariably talking about the weekend where nobody remembers, or the big football game that everybody went to. So relationships are really built on shared experiences. And we can't build those relationships as well unless we can recognize and in some way record what that shared relationship has been. So what we want to do is we want to know who talked to that donor, what did they talk about, what did they care about, when did they volunteer, what is important about their volunteering, is there a donation in honor of someone else, and really get a full picture about someone so that they are really recognized and feel part of that relationship. And the last part of CRM is really the management part. How do we manage all of this? And the first thing is we have a database. But one of the things that can be an issue, particularly for nonprofits, and we see this woman here clearly is overwhelmed by a pile of paper. Very often we have, the old model anyway, is the old data entry person. We fill out an intake form and we hand it to someone and they enter the data. So really the data entry person doesn't have the relationship. So if we are going to go to a relationship-centric sort of model, we have to move that data entry out to the point of relationship. P-O-R, whoever has that relationship with that person should be recording that relationship. So if I send an email to someone, I should be attaching it to their record. If someone has given, if I'm the development director and I've gotten a donation, I should record that donation connected to that person. I would know the flavor and what that relationship looks like. So when we're talking about what is CRM, first and foremost it's a database. It's a way of collecting the data, but we've already talked about sort of how static that kind of thing is. It's really sort of dead. But it does allow us to manage our service delivery and understanding who and what we're dealing with and how often this delivery is, and allow us to look at some outcomes and other things with good data. It's a way to document the work we do. So whether it's in development or in service delivery or managing volunteers or whatever we're doing, a good CRM allows us to track and document our work. It's a support system for building our relationships. Remember we want to record them and through workflow and some other processes available to us, automate some systems and responses say, so automatic emails go out if something else happens. We can support that relationship building. But the biggest thing here, and I hope you all take this away, is it's not really about the database. It's ultimately, as a technology consultant, my job isn't about technology, it's about the people. And so really CRM is an organizational approach to how you do business. It's understanding that we are valuing these relationships and we're recording them at the point of the relationship. So great introduction on what it is. So can you tell us how CRM will benefit nonprofits and libraries? All right, well the first thing is that nonprofits and libraries are all about relationships. It's the coin of our realm. We don't have patents or products or really things that we sell. Most of us are dealing with people and whether it's people that we're asking for funding from foundations or people that we're asking for donations or to set up a walk or one or a lemonade stand, or it's the people we're serving. So we are building relationships with the people we serve so that we can better serve them. This is what we have. And too often this kind of thing is recorded, but not sort of recorded in a way that is valued. So one of the things that can happen for instance is, and this is the traveling development director, and if there are any development directors out there, I don't mean to be spurred to you. You guys are great, and again you're the lifeblood of the nonprofit community. But if we don't have a way to record the work that you do as a development director maybe leaves or moves, they're really the ownership of that relationship. And we've not created the institutional knowledge for an organization in an appropriate way that they can own and really maintain that relationship moving on. The development director has done great work, but we haven't taken full advantage of that because we have not recorded that relationship so that we can build on it going into the future. So it really is important to build on and harness the work we're doing. We can't afford to not take advantage of every little bit of work that we're doing in the nonprofit community. And right now I see very many nonprofits that will collect all these names and sort of emails, and they just spit out again newsletter after newsletter after newsletter instead of looking at that person and sort of building a specific relationship. And that really manifests itself in the idea of the engagement ladder. This is not something that I've created. This is sort of a standard kind of idea in the nonprofit community. And what we want to do is we want to bring somebody up that ladder. And the only way we can do that is to really foster that relationship. People do not give big money to organizations or rarely that they don't have some sort of relationship. And then we have a lot of competition now for people's attention, whether it's all the social media and all the other things like that. But we have to really work harder at both reaching out and creating that relationship but also recording that relationship and so forth. And the reason why a database is so important, particularly for nonprofits, is because we can't afford to hire 40 people so that every person just has to remember three names and gets to know three people. We unfortunately have probably a development group or a volunteer manager or whatever that are working on their own. And they have to try to make do or make more from less. So if we can create a good database that automates some things but also allows them to recognize relationships in an easy way, that's going to be beneficial to a nonprofit often in the long run. And so when we're looking at what this means, very often let's look at some of the negatives here. What does life look like without a CRM? So very often we have trouble producing reports. I've heard the quarterly reports take two weeks to do. That is obviously not something that if we can cut down we're building great benefit for a nonprofit. Everybody is using paper. You don't know what's happening right now. There's no way to see where we are, whether it's in, how much money have we raised so far this year, or how many people are we serving? How many people came through our doors this week? So we end up talking about things when we go to funders or talk about others that we served about 400 people last year, or we helped 600 children. Rather than knowing and being able to relate the demographics and the exact numbers. And ultimately we end up duplicating data and doing a lot of redundant and extra work. And again nonprofits can't afford to waste time and energy. We have small staffs and small budgets and we really need to leverage those. And ultimately if the person involved, the volunteer manager, doesn't have a good feel for what's going on with volunteers in his little section of the organization, certainly that's information that the development director may not have. So the development director now cannot look and see who is volunteering that they may be also a prospect for donations. So we just turn this around obviously. And so life with the CRM is perfect and wonderful. The daisies bloom and the sun shines. But the real big thing here is ultimately it's a tool for growing the organization. If we know what we're doing and we know what's successful, we are able to say where we are today, we can start planning for where we want to go tomorrow. If we talk about strategic planning, strategic technology planning, or even planning a trip, we pull out the map and we first have to find out where are we now. You can't use a map without knowing where you are. So if we have a good CRM, one that tells us where we are and how we're doing, and then it's a matter of being able to look into the future and seeing how we can leverage that and grow our organization. Well, I'm sold. What kind of data do we need to include in our CRM? Well, the first thing about this is the more data you can include, the better. And there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, we want to go buy into a system. And the more people are using it, the more times, the more they're going to buy into it, be comfortable with it, and use it more thoroughly. But really, when we're talking about sharing data around the enterprise or the nonprofit, we want to be able to connect and harness this. Otherwise, we're starting to look at duplicate data. So the old sort of siloed approach where you have some information in the spreadsheet and you may have some information on your website or in your accounting system. One of the things that I tell people that we want to do is, and this seems so obvious to me, and it's very often sort of left out, how do people want to deal with this from nowadays? Everybody goes to the Internet, so they want to deal with you through your website. Well, we have a database that tracks how we deal with people, right? So now, why is our database not or our CRM not connected to our website? And we'll see some advantages of that as we go. So really, the more data we can collect, the better. It's beneficial to the development department to be able to see who is volunteering and who is coming to workshops and who is coming to our events. And obviously, an executive director, the bigger the picture that they can get across the enterprise, the better. So we really like to try to have as few silos as possible on this. And if we can, we try to get everything into a single system. Excellent. So talk about the goals for a second. Okay, really, the goals here are to record interactions with all of our different constituencies. We know, for instance, that a volunteer may also be a board member, may receive service, and may even be a funder of some sort. And so we want to record interactions with multiple constituencies, look and track that shared experience. So what do they do? How did they deal with us? Here's the email. Here's the proposal. Here, we can very quickly sort of see that. And in most CRMs, we sort of are able to use a browsing kind of nature as we're looking through it and get a feel for what's going on with somebody. We want to be able to do a decentralized data entry so that it's happening at the point of the relationship. And so we may need to have a cloud-based or a web-based application to be able to support that. And ultimately a good CRM is part and parcel and part of the very fabric of the organization. If it is not sort of central, if there is not the mantra that sort of says, if it's not the database that doesn't exist, you're going to struggle to be able to really realize all of these terrific benefits. Excellent. So let's talk about some examples that you've worked with in the past. Sure. These are all in and around sort of Philadelphia area, but for instance Cradles to CRMs is also their headquartered in Boston. And they're an organization that sort of a child, they support child supporting organizations. And they took their donors and their volunteers as well as their service delivery and put it all together and created sort of an ordering system that also allows them to now see are their donors and their volunteers the same people. So they can see, hey, these people have now volunteered every week for the last 6 months, and they also gave us $200 last year. Previous to that they had some spreadsheets and another system and it was sort of a little bit more split and it wasn't as easy for them to recognize that. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is an arts membership support organization supporting arts in the Philadelphia area. And they're primarily a membership organization and they were able to combine again their donor and fundraising along with their membership idea in their CRM and they were also able to take their CRM, and this is an important part of CRM and connect it to their website so that members can go in and adjust their own information and support their own membership through a login on the website and connectivity to the database. And lastly, C3 is an organization, they're a very typical sort of health advocacy organization. And the big thing about them is they are able to leverage the workflow and other support processes within a CRM, something that maybe sends out automated emails or responses based on a donation that has been entered or things like that so that they are able to place themselves as a larger or more efficient organization and really push these relationships right to the edge with very few people. So let's talk about how we can get started. How do we get started? Well, I think you need to cross your fingers and hope that you are going to do it a little bit. I think that when we are talking about CRM it can be very difficult. But what we can do is we need to start right from the beginning to try to give ourselves a boost up on being successful with this. So we really need to identify as an organization what success means and that means different things to different organizations. And when we are doing projects like this, we want to make sure that our expectations are all aligned. So identifying what successes is really important. And as we go through, we are going to start establishing what that need is. Why do we have to do that? Again, some of the information we are talking about here are benefits to using a CRM. You need to align those with your organization. Where are the real benefits for your organization? Start to build the buy-in. Buy-in is one of the big sort of, it's something we all chase. It can be different in every organization. The reason is why someone doesn't use a system. Sometimes you've had three bad databases and somebody is not going to expend more energy in this next one. So we really want to do everything we can do to really build that buy-in. And then ultimately we really want to build the right database. So that means we need to make sure we are collecting and understand all of our requirements. And so usually I say, give me the inputs, the outputs, and the business processes. So inputs are intake forms and information. And how does it get into your system? Where does it come from? Outputs obviously are reports or deliverables to funders. And then we have business process. How do we work? So we don't only want to just figure out what data we are putting in, but how, and can we use workflow and automated responses and some of these other things to support our system. But really when it comes to the buy-in, the biggest thing is leading the project. You really need to have somebody within your organization that can be a leader. And so we need to write from the start, listen to the needs of the users. People do not want to be handed a finished database and say, boy, here's your database. This is what you are going to use. And this is the first they've seen or heard of it. If you express the final vision of the outcomes, if you can have someone that says, a bolt beyond the horizon, we are going to have this wonderful system that will allow us to do this, this, this, and this, this is going to get people on board and excited about what you are doing. The next one is align the systems to your user's needs. And the little bracket there is W-I-I-F-M, which stands for what's in it for me. And so everybody has a little bit of what's in it for me. And especially when we are talking about a system where we are going to try to fit everybody into a system, we can probably get an individual system for any one of these departments that may be a little bit stronger or more robust or fit a little bit better. But we may forego some of that so that we can get all of this under a single umbrella and be able to really support the work of each other. And then ultimately we need the leader that is going to drive the process and make sure that it keeps moving and really gets it done. It's a process that can take a long time and we do need to really drive that. So when we are looking at this, I don't want to, we don't necessarily have to read all of these here, but we do need to have both the top executive we can find as well as the entire organization sort of buy into it. We have to sort of be reasonable in what we want. And then we ultimately have to understand what success is going to be for us. And then when we are talking about the requirements, I sort of stated what this is and how we need to understand what we are going to build. So I've had experience with sort of several different kinds of requirements approaches for organizations. And so some organizations, they track only what they do. Here's what we do. Here's our spreadsheet. Give me these fields. Great. We are not going to create any change or look forward or whatever and that's fine. You want to track some organizations, you want to track what you want to do. This is what we are tracking, but we want to do some outcomes tracking as well. Great. Here is a chance for institutional change. We are making some big changes here and we can piggyback and create some new things. The thing you don't want to do is track everything you can think of. There are organizations that will lift thousands of fields because they can. And this is what we thought of. An example of that is I had an organization that asked me to build an alternate fax number field. I can't think of a single reason why you would ever need an alternate fax number. Maybe somebody else can and they can stick it up there on the chat. But for me, it's sort of a sure sign that we are not where we need to be. Great. So now we are going to talk about what should we think about when choosing a system. Okay. Well, when we are doing this, this list here is probably not a surprise to anybody. So we are going to look at the features and we are going to figure out how much it is cost. Is it easy to use and flexible and so forth? And some of that is in the eye of the beholder, but I do think you want to look for a system that is used by a large number of users. That means it is generally vetted and the user experience is pretty streamlined and has been smoothed out over time. We want to make sure that we can implement it in an easy fashion, that it is sustainable, and that we can also integrate our data and so forth. And when we talk about sustainable, this is I think a place where there is a fair number of systems out there that have done a little bit of a disservice to nonprofits. I don't want to mention anybody specifically, but if you have a system that you need to hire a programmer to change or add a field, somebody has done you wrong. We don't have the capacity to have sort of this internal stuff, and it is not easy very often to find external resources at a price that nonprofits can afford. So you need to look for something that we can put in today, but does it have the support, or is there a nonprofit sort of implementer community around it that can make sure that if your original implementer, we don't say gets hit by a bus, we say wins the lottery. So if your implementer wins the lottery, is there somebody else in that community that understands the standards and nonprofits well enough to be able to support you without having to take out a loan? So many of these systems you should be able to add a field or make the changes on your own so that you can support it yourself. And then ultimately there are factors about the sustainability that you should look at right up front. Is it server-based or is it cloud-based? We hear a lot about the cloud. A true cloud system is a data center that the organization runs. All the databases are sitting in the same servers. They're all running the exact same sort of software, and they do the upgrades and support that data center versus you may need something that is server-based for some reason. And then you do have to look then at the additional cost both of maintaining your server, upgrading it, as well as managing your software, and then also being in charge of it, being up and working for you. So the last thing here is really integrating your data. If you are creating another silo for yourself, you've put yourself behind on the curve. We want to make sure that we have a system that not only integrates with things we know, but also gives the ability for us in six months to say, oh, we want to link this into Twitter, or we want to create a Facebook sort of connection through this. So really what you want to do is have something that's called an open API. API stands for Application Programming Interface. People deal with a system through the user interface. That's the forms and the fields we fill out. Applications talk to each other through this application programming interface. And it's really just a language and some code that's published by the database or the CRM vendor that says, this is how you pull information out of our system, and this is how you would put information back in. So if we want to create a website that automatically shows our top contributors or food resources in our database or whatever information in our database lies basically when somebody goes through our website, you're going to do that through the API. One caution, very often somebody that doesn't have an open API will say, we can sync it. If you've ever tried to sync maybe your phone with your Outlook, you know the issues that can happen with syncing. You can end up with duplicates or what overwrites what and how does all of that work? So somebody is saying, oh no, we don't have an open API, but we can just pull it out in the spreadsheet and sync it. Please give that a second look and be a little bit wary of that. That being said, there are wonderful tools out there that are out there that do connect multiple data points, and they're much better and they're really sort of next-generational, but there's an additional cost to them. And then ultimately you want to be able to do communications and be able to reach and build those relationships. It's all about the relationships in this system, so you need a system that obviously can do that. And then there's additional things to look for. Can you tell us a little bit more about some additional things? Okay, well the big thing here is the unique work. I've been in nonprofit technology and working strictly in the nonprofit world for over 15 years now. And I love the fact that every nonprofit really feels that they are unique. And the truth is they really are. However, for most really donations are pretty straightforward. Very often it's in our program delivery where we feel our uniqueness is. But you need to be able to have a system that's flexible enough to capture your specific uniqueness. Every nonprofit does have it. And so you may be membership and donors and seminars, or another one might be volunteers and workshops and grants. And so you need to be able to have a system that supports the different things that you do and is able to capture that or else the system ultimately isn't going to be true for you. You want to make sure that it can integrate with your other systems, i.e. your website. We all understand that there are some government reporting requirements and the government in their wisdom usually says this is the system you use. You don't have any choice. And no, we don't care if it integrates with anything and it doesn't integrate right now. So that's a situation usually where we're going to have to have two systems, but we want to try to keep it to as few as possible. So ultimately we want to be able to get a system that can capture all our relationships and supply us with real-time information through either reporting or dashboards. And those of you that are a little bit new to dashboards, dashboarding really is totally analogous to the idea of the dashboard on your car. It provides you real-time information that for instance you don't need a listing on your car of every place you've been in the last 6 months. You need to know how much gas you have now. So the idea of a dashboard is usually based on a report. It tells us how many donations this month, how many volunteer hours have been produced this week, how many clients have we served today. That sort of real-time information a system needs to give us to really move us ahead. So once this is set up, how can we ensure that it's utilized? Well, if you ever want to really get me going, let's start talking about the truth in databases. You need to have someone within the organization or someone, an external asset that has enough juice to defend the truth within your organization. And that really comes into two sets of clothes. One is the database needs to be able to accurately record the work you do. It needs to be true to the stuff, the programs, the volunteers. If you add a new program, you need to be able to figure out how it's going to be recorded in your database. It needs to be true to the work of your organization. Now, most organizations, almost all of them, are growing and changing. So you cannot stop and just assume we've got it right. You have to continually look, and you have to be aware that every change you make within the organization, we may need to look at a supporting change in the database. The second part is probably even more important, and that is the truth of your data. If your data is not true, if it's not trusted, if we don't know that this is the phone number or we aren't putting in bad spellings for names and things like that, as soon as our data is not true, we don't trust it and we don't use it. So it's very important that we work to maintain the truth of our data. And that means that you have a data entry standards document that says, what do you enter? How do you enter it? When does it get entered? When I come in and I build a database for someone, I'm putting them down the place for them to put their data. When they put that data and what that data looks like, that's up to them. So that has to be sort of a continuous internal process. You need to check it when it goes in. It needs to be checked while it's in there, and we need to double check our outputs. So one of the things that I suggest people in the Philadelphia area, all the Philadelphia areas zip codes start with 191 and then have two numbers after that. So I say, do a report that says, give me every organization whose zip code starts with 191 where the city does not equal Philadelphia. So now you're looking at data where it might say Philly, it might say Philadelphia, something spelled wrong, or it might even say Chicago. And we know we have an issue with our data. So you need to continue working on this to make sure that you're ahead of the curve. You need to look, and hopefully you see some of these signs here. So you've built what you need. You're continuing to review it, and as it changes, as your organization changes, you're changing it, the database, that your data is true. You trust it, that everybody is taking responsibility for entering it, that you're coming up with data validation rules as you're coming along to make sure that this is really what you want in there. You need to have someone within your organization that is looking out and is sort of chief of the above on this slide. So it's really having an advocate within the organization for the database, for the truth of the database, and for the data. And ultimately, the best sign is if your database is being used. If it's not being used, there can be a number of reasons, but if it is being used, then there's a pretty good chance that it's working for you. So I think I have one little last warning here for everyone. We've sped through this really, but we've identified in this process that this is not an easy thing to do. And I sort of joke, and we work with people that are also doing websites, and usually the first meeting somebody says something like, we want a new website that's energetic and easy to maneuver in and expresses our energy. So somebody goes away and they build something, and you either like it or you don't, and you go back and forth. And it doesn't really require a whole lot. When we're doing databases, you can think your house is in order, but my job as a database implementer is to find the dust bunnies. It's to find the processes that are ill-defined to know where you've got something as ambiguous, or your naming convention doesn't quite work. We want to look at that, and we're going to tear it apart. And it really takes, if we're going to do a CRM for an organization, we're going to be looking and working with everyone in that organization. It's going to take a lot of time and sort of a lot of energy, a lot of focus to get it right. So I really recommend you do it, but be aware that when you do it, it's going to be hard before it gets easy. Well said. And yes, this was a lot of information. We have time now for Q&A. And I just want to remind everyone that this was recorded. You can go back and look at it. We'll give you the PowerPoint, and we have the community forums to use as a place to post more questions. There's a really cool chat going on, Becky is forwarding questions around. But I do want to spend just a minute talking about the tools. I know we weren't going to focus on the tools, but people are very curious. What are some of the tools that they should be looking at? And the last thing is there's an article in TechSoup that I will include in the follow-up email that will explain further these tools. But Dean, if you could just mention a couple of the tools that you've used in the past. Sure. So there's sort of a couple of sort of types of tools. Very often CRM sort of gets lumped into a lot of sort of fundraising tools. I tend to believe we want to look at something that can really be used by an entire organization. So I tend to look at more at something like CVCRM, Sugar, Salesforce. You have Microsoft Dynamics is coming along with a great new sort of nonprofit sort of centric offerings. And so when we're looking at some sort of pure CRMs that we can really adapt to the various uses for nonprofit, I think those are probably better than a specific volunteer tool that we're trying to make fit fundraising. Our fundraising tool we're trying to get to capture volunteering or something else. So I would say probably I may be missing something off the top of my head. I think we're probably talking about Dynamics, Salesforce, Sugar, CV. Those are probably the big four right now. And then follow up questions to that, the cost, and if they work with Macs. Okay. Well, when you're talking about Macintosh, the cloud type systems, and I think all of the ones that I mentioned are a cloud based or could be, which means they're accessed through a browser are certainly things that can be used on Macs as well as PCs. You could even use them on other type boxes if you had a Linux box or something like that through sort of a standardized browser, different systems support different browsers, different ways. But for the most part, if you have a browser and access to the Internet, you'd be able to use these. As far as costs, this is probably a huge range. There are sort of quick starts or down and dirties or just give me the basics where you're looking at a couple of thousand dollars or even free. Some of these open source systems are free until you're talking about implementations. They're either donated or whatever, and then really your cost is implementation. But when we're looking at this and you're trying to budget for it, usually what we like to do because we understand sort of the nonprofit cycle is we do an initial engagement with somebody where the deliverable is for them to receive a scope of work so they know what the database is and what the costs are going to be, and then they can go get funding. But we've seen them anywhere. They probably are averaging $5,000 to $15,000, and we've seen them $30,000, $50,000 and $80,000 depending on the size. You know, there's huge nonprofits. The University of Pennsylvania is a nonprofit, and that's obviously they're going to have a whole different thing than a little three-person advocacy organization that wants to build a database. They might be able to get away with a $3,000 to $8,000 type of engagement. Excellent. Thank you for touching on that. So I'm going to move on to a question. Is it possible to use a spreadsheet until it is possible to afford a proper serum? Sure. I guess in the nonprofit we deal with what we can. And so I think that when we're looking at spreadsheets, the first thing that I would say if you're going to use it, try to use it as closely to how it would be in a database as possible. So we want to separate different data bits into different columns. Don't put the whole address into one sort of field in the spreadsheet, and be a little bit thoughtful about what you're capturing. Usually I'm taking information from spreadsheets and putting them into the CRM, and so that's very easy to do, assuming the data is clean. More important to where you're collecting it is that you're collecting the right and clean data ultimately. And if people are concerned about, well, I have this spreadsheet on my computer. I can't share it with people. Consider using Google Docs or Google Spreadsheet and that way it stays online and multiple people can access it simultaneously. So that's pretty helpful. Another question, the biggest barrier to using CRM in our org is centralizing and importing our data. It's on paper and files and email and all over the place. Help in this area would be great. So what's a guessing that you have for Laura? Well, Laura, you are not alone. This is really quite common. People have contacts in their individual outlaws. They have them on their phones or pieces of paper. They're in Excel spreadsheets. They're all over. So the first thing probably is you can export your Outlook into an Excel spreadsheet and that's probably as good a format as anything else. And you can take that and you can combine multiple sort of Outlook contact groups into one sheet that way and then maybe do some deduping. Then after that you're really going to have to take the paper and get it electronic. And what I usually tell people is you can pay me X amount of an hour or you can hire a college kid or an intern or something else and have them just sit there and type this stuff into an Excel spreadsheet. And really that's going to be what you're going to have to do. We have to get it from the paper into electronic. But if we consider the spreadsheet sort of the central thing, we can pull Outlook into Excel spreadsheets. We can take access databases and make it a spreadsheet. And now we can sort of combine them, look at dupes and manipulate them. There's a lot of formulas that we can do to get the data to a reasonable quality to where we can import it to the CRM. So I would get it into an Excel spreadsheet, Laura. And Larry's question, can you suggest ways to validate our data for example when people pass away or move away? How can we keep up with that? Are there tools or subscription services? There are a couple of things that tend not to be cheap. It's something nonprofits struggle with. I think we're probably going to see more of this. I think Jigsaw is a program. I'm not totally familiar with it, but I think it does something like that about filling out additional information. I think the one thing that I would say about that is that if you find out you have bad data, you need to change it in your system right away and that very often taking a little extra time to sort of track down the right data right then and there is probably the best thing to do. I also don't think we should delete people from the system, but we should have some way of identifying people that are inactive for whatever reason. So I hope that's a little bit of a help, Larry. So question, which I tend to agree with a little bit. This is from Steve. It sounds like this is an intensive planning and rolling out project or process. Is there a way to choose a CRM platform and then gradually migrate to it, adding modules as needed over time? Well, yeah, and I'm sorry, I didn't catch who asked that question. Do we have a name there? Steve. Steve, I think that one of the slides there was sort of the idea that this is a never-ending process. So I really do believe that we do not want to swallow the ocean necessarily all the time. I've seen failed implementations because people said, you know what, we're going to stop right now. We're going to capture everything we're going to do and we're not going to move until we implement everything. And for some organizations, they don't have the money or the time or sort of the ability to focus long enough to get it all done. So I think it's really important we can see where the low-hanging fruit is. A lot of times that development is very discreet. It's pretty standard. It doesn't deviate too much from one order to another. And we can get in and we can get development going on that. And they can use the system and sort of build some momentum. And then we can look at phase 2 and 3. I think almost any implementation system, implementation should have at least a second or third phase envisioned almost from the start so that we know we're not finishing and that we have sort of a goal to finish here and what is the next one and the one after that. For me, usually that second phase is starting to involve implementation or integrating systems with website and the database. And very often we put that off because they don't even know how the database is working. And so it's better for them to understand that when we start connecting it up to things. Thank you for that. And this question is from Meredith. We have a furniture bank for our clients. Are there any CRM that can handle inventory tracking and in-kind donations? Well, the first thing is that in-kind donations are not difficult at all in systems. They're simply donations with a different sort of valuing. And very often even with in-kind donations we want to put a value on them so it's a matter of just registering them as a different type of donation. And so when we're looking at donations in CRM we're usually looking at cash or memorial or matching or whatever. And in-kind is just another one. When we're talking about inventory, most of these systems can do some level of inventory. If you're looking for just-in-time or some of the real sort of traditional inventory tools, a CRM probably isn't the best thing. But if you want to get a feel for, hey, we've got 40 couches, and I apologize if I'm well off and I'm just guessing here. But you can do a pretty good job of tracking what this is and what's in the system through these objects. Most of these systems come with sort of a standard. They've got names and addresses and phone numbers in here. It's the old build versus buy. This is sort of the middle ground. It's got names and addresses and emails, and then it allows us to build some custom objects so that if we want to track how many Xs we have, we can do that and bring them in and take them out. And it really is sort of understanding what your needs are to see if a particular system is robust enough for you to use. So I'm not sure if this is, so Hollis had a question, what about integrating the integration of content management systems? And so I guess what the question is is maybe they've got a donor database and they've got a volunteer database. Do you have any recommendations if people have several really good databases but they want to pull them all together into one? What would the process be? Well I think when we're looking at any of these, I think the first and most important thing is understanding your requirements. So it goes back to sort of, can this handle the uniqueness of us? So what are our requirements? We do this and we don't need that. We need to be able to access it through the web browser, but we don't need to send emails. What are the basic requirements? If you're looking, so I think that's about from whatever state you're coming from, whether you have data solutions already and you're migrating to a single one. I think when you have data solutions, you have to be particularly important about and pay attention to the buy-in. So I've had a circumstance where the only part in an organization that had a data structure was the development portion. And so they were a little reticent about giving up something they knew and they liked and that worked for them to work within a new system that everybody was going to play around in, and they were a little nervous about that. And we had to work really hard to talk to them and to everyone about what is the benefit to being able to see and share information and to really share ownership overall. So if you have existing systems, not only do you have to do the requirements, but you have to pay attention again to the people. And the question about security, is there, how secure are these systems and how can people's data be compromised? Well, yeah, so I guess if I could take the question to a simpler form, is the intake form that I have sitting on my desk more or less secure than a cloud-based CRM? So I think that's pretty obvious. I think people tend to feel a little uneasy if their data is sitting somewhere else. But the reality is here that there are protocols and standards and you're using systems that Dell or Starbucks or Bank of America, like major corporations are using, and they've vetted the security. And these systems in the cloud are sitting in data centers. They won't tell you where the data centers are because they don't want you to know for security reasons, and they're being backed up. And there's more redundancies, environmental controls that you or I could ever afford. The big thing that you have to worry about is they're sort of set up to make sure that their system is up and running. What their systems don't do is safeguard you or your new intern from deleting 4,000 records out of your system. You know, if you're using a cloud-based system, you can't go to them and say, can you revert my data back to yesterday? They don't work that way. That's not what their systems are set up to protect. So what you need to do is make sure that you have a system that you can back up or pull your own data from on a regular basis at least weekly so that if you damage your data, you can fix it. And really, the vulnerability there is still about you damaging your data. We have pretty secure lines now through the Internet. Somebody could obviously maybe hack that, but ultimately whether it's in the locked cabinet in your office or in the laptop that somebody is taking on the subway every day, those are not as secure as the data sitting in the secured data centers. And a question slash comment from Lori, so you had mentioned that you would consider FileMaker a CRM, but she thinks it's more of a glorified spreadsheet. So can you comment on that? Did I call FileMaker a CRM? I think FileMaker or Access or Act and Act has changed a little bit, but the older versions of the Act are Contact Management Systems, Outlook. They're address books. They're spreadsheets. We can set up an Excel spreadsheet as an address book. That's great. What is more difficult for FileMaker or Access or Outlook or whatever without add-ins or whatever is to really understand and see what the relationships are. And that's what sets a Salesforce or Dynamics or Civi or Sugar apart from the contact, the address books. So I agree with her. Great. A question from Second Life and also a similar question from someone in ReadyTalk about what's the best way to get people on board using it, the training, getting people excited about using it. Have you heard any kind of fun ways to get people to want to use it? Yeah, and I alluded to the trouble of user adoption. It's something that everybody can struggle with. So I would say lunch and learns are a great way to do it. Do fun documentation. Have some fun with communication. Communicate about the system, do benefits, give somebody the weekly award for the wackiest report built or whatever. Again, it's about the energy that someone is sort of leading this process with. And then it's also about managers and leadership saying, you know what, if it's not in there, it doesn't exist. Go to a meeting and instead of handing out a report, present on the screen the data right out of your CRM. Pull the report up on the screen. Get people sort of working in it and playing in it. Make it fun. Bring some energy. So several questions have to do with specific things about Civi CRM and specific things about Salesforce. Maybe we just take, oh my gosh, it's already new. And that went by so fast. I guess we don't have any more time for questions. Oh, I'm so sorry, because this was really great, great, great stuff. Wow, that's never happened to me before. So I'm going to wrap up this webinar and let you all know that the discussion continues on our community forum. So please show up there, ask your question. We've got lots of volunteers answering questions. There's more on TechSoup than just webinars. We've got donated software articles, our community forums, and we post upcoming events. So check out TechSoup.org. Next week, or in two weeks, we've got 10 social media tips and secrets with Heather Mansfield who is a really well-known webinar presenter. So be sure to make it out for that webinar. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So thanks again everyone for participating and for Becky and Stephanie for helping on the chat. And of course, Dean, for such a great informational presentation with lots of great questions and answers. So thanks again, Dean. Thank you, Cammy, and thank you to everybody that participated. Great questions. Awesome. Have a wonderful day, and we'll see you again at another TechSoup Talks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.