CRM Guide - Discovery - Prepare

1. Understand your data

 Your audit will have helped with some of this, but's important to get clear about the following:

• Do you know where it all is?
• Do you know who owns it?
• Do you know what consents you have?
• Do you have a strategy for cleaning and cleansing the data?
• Do you have a data retention policy?
• Do you know how many contacts you have?

What we are trying to avoid here is something jumping out of the woodwork at the last minute and upending all the good discovery work you have done. 

2.  Know your budget

 While it may feel like you can't prepare a budget without knowing what system you are going to select, this isn't quite true. If you are funding this from existing monies, you should know how much you are prepared to spend on it. If you are going out for funding, then you need to ask for what it really takes to deliver the project. Coming in too light will come back to bite you later.

You also need to be realistic about what you will have available year-on-year to keep paying for the database. Whilst there are no hard and fast rules, here are some examples/guidance

Micro/small charities

Managing basic fundraising then implementation could be from £1-5k, and your annual licensing might be around £2-4k per year.

Small/Medium charities

Managing fundraising, memberships, volunteering then implementation could be from £8-20k, and your annual licensing might be around £5-8k per year.

Medium + charities

Managing fundraising, memberships, events, volunteering, case work, programme delivery then implementation will probably start from £15k and could go up to £40k. Your annual licensing might be around £7-15k per year.

3. Understand your timeline

 You might just know you need to do this soon-ish, or you might have a hard stop; for example you have a contract renewal coming up on your current system that you need to work backwards from.

Do not underestimate the time you need to commit to supporting this process. Even if you are going to work with a partner, you can't just hand it over to them and take it back at the end. You need to participate in the requirements building, systems selection, testing, training as well as managing the change into the organisation.

The bottom line is - this takes months not weeks.

• Diary management - organising collaborative workshops and 121s with key team members simply takes time. People are busy doing the day job and aligning diaries can be tough!
• Process challenges - Workshops and 121s can be challenging, and often throw up questions that you might not have thought about as we approach different ways of working. This invariably leads to internal discussions and decisions needing to be made, which naturally take time for people to work through.
• Change management - You will have changes to internal processes and ways of working. Again this will need time to understand, finesse and roll out to the team. People will have set ways of working currently and unfortunately it is not as easy as just writing a new process and setting people going using it.
• Third parties - You might be dependent on others, for example to assist with data extraction and understanding the structure. The pace of this is usually dictated by their availability.
• Testing - In order for you to be confident that the new system achieves all your requirements, you will need to build up test plans to execute. This is often more time consuming and challenging than people account for, and is often where we see the biggest time slippage.
• Training - Usually this is delivered in a 'train the trainer' model, where you select system 'champions' to assist with training the rest of your team. This approach supports your change management. It gives you a number of people within the organisation with deeper knowledge and confidence, who can support the less confident team members as the system embeds.
• Data migration - This always takes longer than people think. You will need to clean and cleanse the data, and support whoever is doing the migration to understand the existing structure, so that they can migrate it to the new structure.

4. Understand your processes

 If you don't have clarity on your processes, and there is little or no documentation, it will be really hard to pick the right system to support them - and even harder to configure it. While it's fairly likely the new system will mean some tweaks and changes to your processes, there needs to be a foundation to begin with. If you don't have these in place, you will need to work on documenting your core processes before you go much further. 

5. Build a RAID Log

 Build a RAID Log (we’ll use a variation here - Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Decisions)Building a RAID log now not only helps with any business case you need to write, it will help feed into your selection process. It will surface any worries, and ensure the selection you make addresses them. 

6. Build a business case

 This might be for your trustees or for a funder. Either way, it's important to bring all the key points together to help make your case.