Using CiviCRM: Develop and implement a fully functional, systematic CRM plan for your organization Using CiviCRM

Constituent Relationship Management initiatives can be difficult. At their best, they involve changing external relationships and internal processes and tools. Externally, the experiences that the constituents have of your organization need to change, so that they provide more value and fewer barriers to involvement. Internally, business processes and supporting technological systems need to change in order to break down departmental operations' silos, increase efficiencies, and enable more effective targeting, improved responsiveness, and new initiatives. The success of the CRM projects often depends on changing the behavior and attitudes of individuals across the organization, and replacing, changing, and/or integrating many IT systems used across the organization.

Succeeding with the management of organizational culture change may involve getting staff members to take on tasks and responsibilities that may not directly benefit them or the department managed by their...

CRM systems and their functional components such as fundraising, ticket sales, communication with subscribers and other stakeholders, membership management, and case management are essential for the core operations of most non-profits. This can lead to a legitimate fear of project failure when changing them. However, this fear can easily create a perfectionist mentality, where the project team attempts to overcompensate by creating too much oversight, too much contingency planning, and too much project discovery time in an effort to avoid missing any potentially useful feature that could be integrated into the project. While planning is good, perfection may not be good, since perfection is often the enemy of the good.

CRM implementations risk erring on the side of what is known, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as the MIT Approach. The MIT approach believes in, and attempts to design, construct, and deploy, the "Right Thing" right from the start. Its big-brain...

Whatever approach your organization decides to take for developing and implementing its CRM strategy, it's usually good to have an agreed upon process and methodology. Your processes define the steps to be taken as you implement the project. Your methodology defines the rules for the process, that is, the methods to be used throughout the course of the project. The spirit of the problem solving approaches just reviewed can be seen in the Traditional Waterfall Development model and in the contrasting Iterative and Incremental Development model.

It's important to ensure that the process and methodology you adopt for your CRM initiative is appropriate to your organization's culture and size, the complexity of its existing systems, and the scale of your CRM effort. This goal of "right-sizing" the process to fit your needs is essential, both for you as the project manager/decision maker, and for any consultants you engage in the process. Besides having familiarity with your methodology of choice, the project team (organization leaders, staff, and consultants) should understand and appreciate how you have right-sized the project. For example, if you represent a small organization with two to five staff members, a volunteer board and committee structure, and 3,000 contact records, building too much structure and process into your project will impede efficient progress rather than helping it. You need enough structure to make sure that the project is well-defined, well-managed, effectively tested, and implemented...

A critical factor in the success of your CRM initiative will be deciding who is on your strategy and implementation team. The size of the team will obviously vary between organizations; those with three staff members will have to do things differently than those with 300. While this section is oriented towards larger organizations, the principles apply to any size.

The implementation team includes the people who will play a direct role in the ongoing project development. Not everyone affected by the CRM initiative needs to be on this core team tasked with driving the strategy and implementation. A good working group seldom is larger than six to eight people, and very often, a smaller group can be more effective. What is most important is that this team should be representative of the different voices of the project—organization, leadership, end users, developers/implementers, important stakeholders, and so on.

Usually, it is immediately clear that the involvement and cooperation...

At the beginning of a CRM project you'll need to do some planning, whether this means creating a feature backlog for the discovery phase of an Agile process, pre-planning for an iterative process, or the initial work in the planning phase for a Waterfall process. What planning you should do and when you do it will vary depending on the process adopted for your CRM project, the general management practices for approving and analyzing projects in your organization, and possibly the requirements of external funders such as foundations and other grant-giving organizations.

The following outline of preliminary activities includes some items that may not be required by less formal and less structured organizations. Even if, despite our advice to the contrary, you're treating your CRM project as limited exclusively to the technical implementation of one or more CiviCRM components like online donation processing, we'd encourage you to review this section for ways to make it a success...

Many non-profits have processes and activities with certain types of constituents that are analogous to those in the marketing and sales areas of for-profit business. Two metaphors that are common in the for-profit arena have crossover value for non-profits. The first one is a sales funnel, with a larger number of unqualified prospects needing to enter at the top, in order to have a smaller number of sales fallout at the bottom. The second one is the notion of a ladder of engagement, with contacts being classified according to how many steps they have taken, such as revealing more information about themselves, or increasing involvement on the path toward becoming a client, donor, or volunteer.

In both these metaphors, the overarching goal is to increase commitment and involvement. You want the casual newsletter recipient to eventually become a donor, the first-time event attendee to eventually become a member. Pushing deeper, or rather climbing higher...

Depending on your process—Agile, or more traditional—you will determine your needs in a less or more formal way. Whatever your process, some approaches are always appropriate.

First of all, it's useful to review the functionality, data structures, and data in your existing systems. Functionality is the easiest to discuss. It provides a sense of the sets of fields—custom data and profiles in CiviCRM's terminology—that may be needed in the new system. When analyzing existing systems, don't be limited to your primary contact database alone. For example, if you use paper sign-up sheets at events or have other paper, e-mail, or web-based data collection forms that are not part of your primary system, be sure to include them in the discovery analysis. With data structures, you'll be able to start mapping out how to migrate data from the existing to the new system. As part of this, you'll be able to identify the custom fields that may be needed, and others that are no longer...

In this section, we're going to delve more deeply into the functional areas supported by CiviCRM. We'll be reviewing the kinds of questions to ask, often of a more technical nature, that will help in planning your implementation.

After conducting interviews and soliciting input through surveys and other means with key users and stakeholders you should be in a good position to develop a phased implementation plan that schedules the delivery of chunks of functionality over the life of the CRM initiative. Depending on your process and methodology, you might start working on some easy low-hanging fruit with users in one area while the scope and requirements in other areas remain vaguely stated in a one-page plan. Alternatively, you might choose to have a multi-year plan with significant specifications for all phases in a set of documents.

In any case, your organization should recognize that its CRM initiative is not just a technology project. For each segment of constituents, the CRM plan should have a strategy targeting the number of constituents involved, the level of their involvement, the quality of their experience in the organization, and a clear sense of how this will help achieve the mission...

This chapter outlines how to create a successful CiviCRM implementation project.

It lists common barriers to the success of CRM initiatives that arise because of either people issues in an organization or technical issues getting systems and tools supporting disparate business functions that provide integrated functionality.

We advocate a pragmatic approach to implementing a CRM strategy for your organization. We encourage the adoption of a change in approach and associated processes and methodologies that works for your organization: wide ranges in the level of structure, formality, and planning all work in different organizations. Your implementation plan should include a schedule and a realistic budget including on-going costs.

Choosing the right people for your team is crucial to the success of the endeavor. Ideally you'll include an executive or board sponsor, one or more key functional managers, one or more key staff users, and appropriate technical expertise for your team, all...