Third Sector

Your house (or CRM) should be unique to you! CRMs are like houses (part 4)

CRMs are like houses. Over the next few months, we’ll be looking at how you can be getting the most from your ‘house’, giving you tips and tricks to get your dream home (or CRM!).

By this stage, you should have gotten around to choosing your dream house (or CRM!)-congrats! If you haven’t yet, take a look at last month’s post “How to find your dream house”.

Before we chat next time about ‘moving in’, it’s important to realise that your ‘house’ should be unique to you! Whether your CRM system is for managing your fundraising, or for delivering your services, your CRM should be unique to you.

Generally, your organisation will require a CRM system for two purposes:

  1. Fundraising

  2. Delivering services


It’s tempting to try and get one CRM system that can do both, but I’d highly recommend against that. It is possible to use the same provider for these two purposes, HOWEVER don’t try and fit both purposes into the same ‘house’.


I’ll give you an example.



An organisation decided to use their fundraising CRM to start managing their beneficiaries. At the start, both operations were small, so it seemed like an easy fix to put them both in the same place. They classified their record types as different things (e.g. beneficiaries and donors) and recorded email interactions. Over time, however, both of these teams grew.

  • The fundraising team wanted to start arranging events, segmenting their donors, tracking pipelines. They created a whole bunch of custom fields and activities to record everything they were doing.

  • Meanwhile, the operations team realised they wanted to start measuring outcomes, surveying beneficiaries, and running events so created a bunch of custom fields and activities to track their outcomes and outputs.


Now, both these things would have been fine if they’d had two different ‘houses’ (even if it was hosted on the same platform). However, what resulted was the FR team got frustrated with all (of what they thought were) unnecessary activities that the frontline team used and vice versa. Both teams got frustrated and they spent a lot of time and money deciding to start again.

What would have been better is to look for two separate databases that could handle each of their activities and grow them in their own way.

What do YOU need?

  • For both types of databases, it’s important to think about what YOU need. What do your teams do and how do you want data to come into your system? How do your processes differ from other organisations and what might you need to do differently?

  • Do you need to think about integrations to feed into your CRM? Are there any ‘extensions’ that the database offers that will allow you to customise it to your needs?

  • Also, try and keep things as tidy as possible. What’s the minimum amount of information you need to bring into your system to get the insight you need? i.e. avoid duplication of information in two systems where possible.

What’s next?


Next time, we’ll talk about how to ‘move’ successfully, thinking about clearing out your old house and prepping your new house for what you’re about to move in!