3 Tips To Get Your Nonprofit’s Staff To Adopt Your New CRM

Image courtesy of Jasbedi

It can feel liberating to migrate over scores of client, donor, and constituent information from Excel spreadsheets, or pen and paper to a robust CRM system like VolunteerConnect.

And it can feel equally as terrifying to realize that you now have to implement this fancy new piece of technology into your day-to-day activity. Your nonprofit’s employees are likely comfortable in their old ways, happy doing things they way they’ve ‘always been done’, and not so eager to dive head first into the use of a new piece of tech.

The trick is usability. Making sure that your nonprofit’s new piece of technology is usable right from the very start. Here are a few tricks Tech Impact suggest you try the next time you implement a CRM or other piece of technology into your nonprofit.

1. Start slow

   Start slow when implementing your CRM. Have your employees input only the most pertinent bits of information first. Call times, length, donation amounts, donation frequencies. Anything that can be done quickly and efficiently.
   
   
   Now that your employees are starting to gain confidence with your new system, begin vamping up the requirements. Have them add more and more information every single week until all of the information you need input into the system is being put in.




2. Show and tell

   It is important to show your employees just how important it is to enter all that information into your CRM. Create visually stimulating presentation after a month or two that represents the data they’ve entered
   
   
   Next, tell them what exactly it this new piece of technology is going to help. Perhaps you are hoping to solve a problem, increase production, or simply increase revenue. Whatever your purpose was for implementing this new system, make sure your team knows in full detail the who, why and whats of the implementation.




3. Consider timing a key factor

   To avoid alienate your nonprofit’s employees, make sure the timing is just right when implementing your CRM. If your nonprofit experiences more traffic during specific times of the year, be sure not to make sweeping tech changes during the time. Making changes when your employees are busiest is an easy way to quickly frustrate employees and set them up for failure.