Solving Nonprofit Industry CRM Data Management Challenges

Nonprofit organizations exist to do good in the world, supporting causes that deeply resonate with their mission and values. They are an integral cog in the wheels of society, often stepping in to help those who are underserved by their communities, markets, and governments.

However, their ability to effectively support these causes is contingent upon their organizational efficiency. And the way nonprofits collect, manage, and utilize data is perhaps the most crucial determining factor in their overall effectiveness. Data management directly impacts their capacity to drive positive change and fulfill their mission.

Like any organization, nonprofits need to effectively track their relationships to achieve their missions. However, they face unique challenges when it comes to the data they need to collect and manage.

For companies, tracking data in a CRM is relatively straightforward: you have contacts, companies, and deals, and the primary task is ensuring that these related records are properly clean, complete, consistent, and linked to other relevant records. Companies that use their CRM in standard ways have ample support from CRM help documents and community forums to solve common problems.

For nonprofits, the situation is far more complex.

They must manage a diverse array of stakeholders, including donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries, along with tracking donations, grants, and events. This diverse data doesn't fit neatly into the predefined CRM record types. Because of this, nonprofits often face the difficult decision of whether to create new custom objects for each type of record—custom objects that will potentially lack the built-in features and functionalities of standard CRM objects—or to try to adapt existing objects like contacts and companies through the use of custom fields.

Let’s examine some of the common data management challenges that nonprofit companies face when using popular CRM platforms.

Common Data Management Challenges for Nonprofit Companies

The choice of whether to create custom fields or adapt existing structures such as contacts and companies has significant implications for data management and overall system functionality. CRM features that are available for default record types may not be available for custom ones. The absence of these features can lead to difficult-to-fix data quality issues like duplicate records, which can compromise the integrity and usability of the CRM data.

And the challenges of this decision often do not become apparent until the nonprofit is already actively using the CRM system. By the time issues surface, it may be too late to make changes without a lot of effort and cost. And for nonprofits, having clean, reliable data is critically important for compliance considerations.

Let’s look at some of the common issues that nonprofits face when using CRMs.

• Diverse stakeholder management: Nonprofits deal with various stakeholders, including donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, members, and staff. Managing data for such diverse groups can be complex, and standard CRM record types and fields are not well-suited for such varied data.
• Donor data complexity: Tracking donor history, preferences, engagement, and communication requires detailed and accurate data. Nonprofits must manage one-time, recurring, and in-kind donations, and must be able to segment donor data for targeted campaigns both before and after donations take place.
• Grant management: Nonprofits often rely on grants, requiring detailed records of applications, reporting requirements, deadlines, and communication with grantors.
• Event management: Organizing and tracking events, including attendees, registrations, and follow-ups, involves handling a large amount of data that needs to be accurately recorded and easily accessible.
• Integration with other systems: Nonprofit software and tools may be less likely to integrate with popular CRM systems compared to for-profit business software.
• User adoption and training: Getting staff and volunteers to adopt and effectively use the CRM system requires comprehensive training and ongoing support, which can be difficult to manage with limited resources. This is especially true for nonprofits that are using unique setups and data structures in their CRM, which may make it more difficult for users to find help documentation that applies to them.

Other challenges faced include user adoption and training, 

There are many technical issues that nonprofit organizations use when using popular CRM systems. And these issues can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of their organization and their ability to be successful in their mission.

How These Issues Impact Nonprofits

The data management issues faced by nonprofit companies can significantly impact their operations and effectiveness. Here are some of the key impacts:

• Reduced donor engagement and volunteer retention: Inaccurate or incomplete donor data can lead to ineffective communication and engagement, hurting the donor experience, and reducing the likelihood of donations and support. Inadequate tracking of volunteer preferences, skills, and availability can lead to dissatisfaction and cause volunteers to become unengaged.
• Inefficient fundraising efforts: Poor data management can result in uncoordinated fundraising campaigns, duplication of efforts, and missed opportunities for donor segmentation and targeted appeals.
• Compliance risks: Failure to properly manage and secure sensitive donor, volunteer, and beneficiary data can result in non-compliance with data privacy regulations, leading to legal and financial repercussions.
• Ineffective program management: Low-quality data can hinder the ability to track program outcomes, measure impact, and make data-driven decisions for program improvement and resource allocation.
• Increased administrative burden: Manual data entry and reconciliation due to poor quality data can increase administrative workload, diverting resources from mission-critical activities.
• Missed grant opportunities: Inefficient grant management processes can lead to missed deadlines, incomplete applications, and failure to meet reporting requirements, resulting in lost funding opportunities.
• Difficulty in measuring impact: Challenges in collecting and analyzing data can make it difficult to measure and communicate the impact of the organization’s work to stakeholders, affecting credibility and funding.
• Limited personalization: Lack of detailed data can hinder the ability to personalize communications and campaigns, reducing the effectiveness of outreach and fundraising efforts..

Looking at that list, it’s clear that data quality has an outsized impact on the success of nonprofits, although its importance is often overlooked. Poor data quality negatively impacts almost all corners of the organization.

How Insycle Helps Solve Nonprofit CRM Data Management Issues

Insycle is designed to integrate seamlessly with popular CRM systems, offering support for both standard and custom record types, depending on the route your nonprofit decides to take. Insycle provides nonprofits with a full suite of features for any custom objects they create, including crucial functionalities like deduplication, association, data cleaning, and data health audits. By using Insycle, nonprofits can ensure their CRM systems are robust and efficient.

Example 1: Deduplicate Nonprofit Custom Objects Like Volunteers, Donors, and Events

With Insycle, you can deduplicate any record type,—including custom objects like volunteers, donors, and events—using any data field as a potential matching field. 

And, you can set rules on a field-by-field basis to determine which donor data you'd like to keep.

With your template identifying duplicate donors in your system and merging their data effectively, you can then automate your donor deduplication template to run on a set schedule—hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.

Example 2: Associate Contacts to Donor Organizations

Collecting money from donor organizations is a critical part of nonprofit operations, and that often means an account-based approach with multiple contacts at the organization. 

You can even use Insycle to look for missing associations. For example, a donor can be associated with their donor company. And the company might be associated with a donation (deal), but the contact is not associated to the deal. Insycle can detect and fix that. 

And of of these templates can be added to your HubSpot Workflows so that associations happen immediately after a record is created. 

Example 3: Format Volunteer Phone Numbers For Automated Phone Reminders

With Insycle, you can format or standardize any deal in bulk. Included in the standard formatting functions are a range of common phone number formatting options, which are able to ignore seperator and formatting elements to examine just the underlying data. 

With your phone numbers consistently formatted, you can ensure that your automatic call and text reminder systems go out to all eligible donors and contacts, maximizing donations. 

Automate These Templates

You can also bundle templates into Insycle Recipes. And you can inject Recipes directly into HubSpot Workflows. This ensures that data is cleaned immediately after it enters the system and before the first communications go out to stakeholders.

The ability to properly analyze, clean, associate, and deduplicate custom objects in bulk means that nonprofits spend less time tracking relationships and more time creating them. Insycle streamlines these processes, making data management less laborious and monotonous.

With these data management concerns off their plate, nonprofits can focus on raising more money for their causes. Insycle helps them become more effective organizations overall, freeing up valuable resources to drive their mission forward.

Streamlining Nonprofit Data Management With Insycle

Nonprofit organizations face a unique set of challenges when it comes to CRM data management. They need to manage diverse stakeholder relationships, including donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries, as well as track donations, grants, and events. These varied data types do not fit neatly into predefined CRM record types, often leading to inefficient data handling and increased administrative burden on top of the usual data issues found in CRMs.

Insycle offers a comprehensive solution to these challenges by integrating with custom record types and providing a full suite of data management features. Through Insycle's Customer Data Health Assessment, nonprofits can audit their databases nightly and create custom templates to address specific data issues. Insycle's ability to standardize data, enforce conventions, and automate data cleaning processes ensures that nonprofits can maintain high data quality.

Take control of your nonprofit's data management with Insycle. By leveraging Insycle's powerful tools and automation capabilities, you can free your organization from the complexities of nonprofit data management and dedicate more resources to achieving your mission.