Your CRM is the heart of your nonprofit’s software system. A robust CRM can help inform your budget, strategic plan and outreach efforts, but a better understanding of this software is crucial to maximizing its features.

To ensure your nonprofit is making the most of your CRM, this article will explore five key aspects of a nonprofit CRM that all nonprofit professionals should know, including how to:

1. Maximize your communication tools.
2. Leverage your donor data.
3. Integrate your software.
4. Track key metrics.
5. Keep your data clean.

The tips in this guide revolve around essential CRM features and best practices for gaining more from those features. How you apply these tips will vary depending on your CRM.

1. Maximize your communication tools.

Your CRM should help keep your nonprofit in touch with your supporters by providing various communication tools. These tools and their exact features will vary between CRMs, but all solutions should help you deepen relationships with your supporters while also maximizing the efficiency of your messages.

To achieve both goals, your CRM should come equipped with or allow you to integrate communication tools. Ensure that your CRM solution has robust communication features or can integrate with a messaging platform that allows you to do the following:

• Send automatic thank you messages. CharityEngine’s nonprofit donations guide lists email automation as a core CRM functionality, making it easy to send prompt acknowledgments and donation receipts. While your nonprofit should show appreciation in various ways, an automatic thank you message immediately after the donation will start your donors’ engagement off on the right foot. These messages can also serve as a helpful confirmation so donors can be sure their payment went through without issue.
• Personalize messages. You can deepen your nonprofit’s connections to supporters with personal messages specifically for them. Your CRM should allow you to automatically populate your message templates with your supporters’ personal information, ensuring each email is addressed to a specific recipient and not a generic “dear donor.”
• Segment your audience. Dividing your audience into segments allows you to create unique emailing lists, ensuring you send your supporters messages that are relevant to them. Ensure your CRM has the option to create custom segments so you can divide your supporters based on your nonprofit’s unique needs.

Maximizing your communication tools also means targeting donors with effective outreach. Don’t send a direct mail piece to every donor; a younger group will throw it away. Send that cohort an email and watch engagement skyrocket! It’s important that you use all the channels available in your CRM so you’re reaching donors the way they prefer.

2. Leverage your donor data.

Your donor data can help you build stronger relationships with your supporters to retain them longer and grow their contributions over time. After all, most major donors begin their engagement with moderate donations and make significant contributions after they’ve built a strong relationship with your nonprofit. Your CRM should help you identify supporters who have the potential to become major donors.

Your CRM should either come equipped with tools to conduct prospect research or help you collect and manage this data through an integration with a wealth screening database. Specifically, your CRM should help you identify donors who have the two characteristics of prospective major donors:

• Affinity: Is this donor interested in missions like yours? For most donors, you can make inferences about their affinity to give to charitable causes like yours based on their previous support. For example, if a donor has made large gifts exclusively to arts-based nonprofits, you can assume they might be interested in supporting your arts nonprofit.
• Capacity: Does this donor have the financial ability to make a major contribution? You can infer if a donor has the financial capacity to become a major donor by looking for wealth indicators. These can include net worth, real estate holdings, business connections and more. For instance, some donors may not be able to give in large amounts alone but work for a business with a generous corporate philanthropy program that could potentially help your nonprofit.

This data tends to be qualitative rather than quantitative. To track it and ensure the right information is connected to the right donor, your CRM should allow you to make notes in donor profiles. These tools can also help you track your relationship development with prospective major donors to help you make your ask at the right time.

3. Consolidate your software.

There are an endless amount of solutions your organization could use, from specialized nonprofit fundraising software to communication management tools.

An alternative to looking for several solutions that can work together is to instead invest in an all-in-one CRM solution. These CRMs will include a suite of nonprofit software that is all already interconnected in a single solution. These tools will vary, but usually include:

• Event management tools. Plan events, from a registration page to an automated thank-you email. Even add attendance data to donor profiles!
• Advocacy software. Advocacy-specific tools help divide your donor messaging lists based on your individual campaigns to cultivate new relationships based on your advocacy efforts.
• Donation pages. Your donation page is one of your nonprofit’s most important tools. It allows you to earn revenue from supporters online. If your solution also offers payment processing, you can keep all functionality in one system.

Many fundraising platforms have extensive integrations to expand functionality. The best CRMs have entirely native tools and real-time data; integrating third-party systems leads to vulnerabilities and makes real-time data impossible.

4. Track key metrics.

As your nonprofit strives to meet various fundraising, communication and donor stewardship goals, you’ll need a way to measure your progress. Your CRM is the hub of your organization’s data and should come equipped with tracking and reporting tools that will allow you to monitor key metrics.

Your nonprofit and your short and long-term goals will determine which metrics you should focus on. However, many useful metrics can be used to monitor your nonprofit’s overall health, making it a good idea to gather data on them even if they are not currently your primary focus. These metrics include:

• Total donations
• Average donation amount
• Donor retention
• Donor demographic information
• Event attendance
• Clickthrough rate
• Donor conversion rate
• Landing page traffic

Remember that your CRM is a data collection and management tool. While there are some CRM solutions with smart technology that can offer advice about your data, it will ultimately be up to your team to determine what actions you take.

In these instances, it can be useful to partner with a consultant to get a professional opinion. If your CRM has a carefully documented history of your past data, you can share this information with your consultant to help them get up to speed with your nonprofit faster.

5. Keep your data clean.

If you want to make your data usable long-term, you can better maintain your CRM by keeping its data clean. NPOInfo defines nonprofit data hygiene as, “the ongoing procedures and processes involved with keeping a nonprofit’s main database, its CRM system, ‘clean’ or with few errors.”

Specifically, maintaining good data hygiene means regularly examining your database to identify and remove various errors that tend to occur over time. These errors will vary but usually include:

• Duplicate data. While cleaning your CRM’s database, look for duplicate information, such as multiple profiles for the same donor resulting from a registration form typo.
• Inconsistent data. Something as simple as a donor taking a married last name can lead to duplicate and inconsistent records. Your CRM likely offers deduping tools that can keep data clean.
• Missing data. In some cases, you may discover that you are missing essential data about your donors after a data import. Make sure all key data moves over!

To keep your CRM’s data clean, practice routine maintenance. Some CRMs have data hygiene features that flag potential issues, but most of these problems can benefit from a human touch when analyzing them and finding a solution.

Your CRM is one of your nonprofit’s most important tools for gathering and managing data. The top platforms will give your nonprofit the tools you need to connect with donors and track your nonprofit’s overall success. Additionally, take the time to check up on your CRM to ensure all processes are in functioning order.