Not all donation processing solutions are built the same. There are many additional things to consider, including flexibility of integration, reporting, transparency, and customer service.
Apart from actual fundraising dollars, donor and transactional data are tremendous benefits that can be captured when using a well-designed donation processing solution. For many nonprofits, the degree to which this information is captured and used depends on the Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) platform they use.
To gain a deeper understanding of how nonprofits can successfully choose, use, or migrate CRMs, we’ve invited our partners at iMission Institute to share their experiences, focusing on a practical situation that many nonprofits face: migrating from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT to Salesforce.
iMission: Serving Nonprofits since 2012
iMission Institute, a digital solutions agency for the social-good sector, has extensive experience working with clients migrating from Raiser's Edge to Salesforce. They offer end-to-end digital marketing and CRM services, helping nonprofits and social service organizations raise more money, cultivate authentic engagement, and streamline work. Through their work partnering with nonprofit organizations to meet their CRM goals, iMission has established best practices for efficient and successful migrations
iATS’ Consultant Partner Manager, Sebastian Arciniega, spoke with Riley Cameron, Director of CRM Operations at iMission, who generously offered her insights on this subject. In our conversation, Riley offers tangible and practical advice that nonprofit leaders can use to inform their digital maturity journey.
Read how iMission successfully migrated a nonprofit organization from Blackbaud to Salesforce here.
A Conversation with Riley Cameron, Director of CRM Solutions:
S: Hi Riley, thank you so much for offering your insights. Happy to have you here.
R: Thanks, happy to be here.
S: To kick us off, would you mind giving us a summary of your experience with iMission and a bit of background on the type of work you do for your clients?
R: iMission is a digital solutions agency for social sector organizations. What we define as digital solutions are divided into two sides of our practice. We have web development, SEO, and marketing - the frontend side - and then we have our CRM practice where we're a Salesforce partner, our platform of choice.
I’ve been at iMission for about 2 years, starting as a Salesforce consultant and now heading up the CRM practice. I love it because I get to work with so many impactful organizations and I’m constantly learning about Salesforce and technology, which is fun for me.
S: What types of organizations do you typically work with and what stands out about them in your experience?
R: We work exclusively with nonprofits. Many of our clients are human service organizations. We are based in Connecticut and have built a strong regional presence, which I like because I often get to see my clients in person to spend the day with them and do training.
That being said, we have clients coast to coast, which is a great thing about this industry and the opportunities remote work offers. We can, for example, help an urban debate league in California while working with our community organizations here in Connecticut.
Human services is such a meaningful space to be supporting and partnering with because it touches so many different members of the community in so many different ways. That's what stands out about working in this space and how I've enjoyed working.
S: Super interesting. I imagine it must be rewarding to see how these technology projects translate into impact in your clients’ constituencies.
R: Yes, exactly!
S: I want to focus today’s conversation on the CRMs nonprofits use. A CRM migration seems a lot like moving house – something that you know will be stressful but can lead to a much higher quality of life in the long term. What would you say to a leader at a nonprofit who’s interested in making a change but doesn’t know where to start?
R: I think that’s a great analogy.
Like you said, it can lead to long-term higher quality of life and that is my biggest advice when talking with everyone from executive leadership to the end users, the daily service providers, and the program deliverers who are using these tools to try to prioritize those long term benefits over what might probably be some short term pain.
It's always going to take an upfront investment of time and resources, both financial and human, but that investment in the long term will give you efficiency and just a better experience for your staff, a better experience for the people that you're serving in your community and hopefully give you the platform - the scaffolding - to really grow your organization in a strategic and impactful way.
S: Great point. I imagine many conversations with potential clients start with a status quo of: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” even though their situation may not be optimal.
With all the demands that nonprofit leaders face regularly, when should these long-term benefits be prioritized? Are there any indicators or pain points you recognize that people can look for in their own organization that show a change is needed?
R: One main thing I see is when there are workarounds on top of workarounds. At a certain point, if your organization or your programming has changed or if you have a new grant funder and you need to report more robustly on your outcomes in your fundraising, all of those changes are signs that you may have outgrown your system and are always a good opportunity to take a look inwards and ask:
“Ok, why all these workarounds? How much time are they taking away from me and my team? How much are they costing? Is the benefit of removing the pain greater than the cost of moving to a new system?”
Then use the answers to these questions to decide what you want in a new system. If you weigh your responses and think “This is decidedly not what I want to do anymore,” use that as an indication to see what's out there.
S: Let’s dive deeper into Salesforce and Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. I’ve noticed that many nonprofit consulting firms offer Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce migrations (or vice versa) as a service. What makes these two solutions so ubiquitous, and why do you believe this is such a common migration?
R: Raiser's Edge is a tool that has been around in the nonprofit industry for a long time. It is purpose-built for fundraisers and so, out of the box, it's powerful for straightforward donor and fundraising management. It has just a lot of features that you don't necessarily need to custom-build and have a consultant to enable you to use it. That's definitely where Raiser’s Edge shines.
For Salesforce, and I’ll acknowledge I’m a bit biased here, I think it serves more as a platform. By that I mean you can build on and operate many different business functions, not just limited to fundraising.
Salesforce is a much more open ecosystem so you can take advantage of many best-in-class apps to meet different business needs. You can have your fundraising tool of choice installed or build something custom directly in Salesforce. You can have your program management team use one app, your case management team use another, and then maybe your institutional funding and Grant team use another.
So, it’s more robust in the sense that you can use it as a 360-degree view of your organization and your constituency. I think that the main driver of folks wanting to transition to Salesforce is that it's not just a single-use tool, it's a multi-use platform.
Although Salesforce isn’t a purpose-built solution like Raiser’s Edge, they meet that need through, for instance, the managed packages of the NPSP (Nonprofit Success Pack), their program management module, which are community-driven and community-built packages that help nonprofits more easily use Salesforce.
Now there's this whole new generation of the Nonprofit Cloud. This again speaks to the idea of a platform on which you can operate your nonprofit not just for fundraising with specific features, but for many other use cases as well.
S: What are some of the key features of each that make them valuable tools for nonprofits and how do they compare with one another?
R: For Raiser’s Edge there's a sense of familiarity in the industry. You have a strong community of nonprofit fundraisers who are Raiser’s Edge super-users and experts. Again, it‘s built in a way that makes it very straightforward to use for fundraising, and in recent years, they’ve been opening up the platform more because of the demand from the industry to connect apps and data from other sources. I also think that querying capabilities and Raiser’s Edge are powerful, so from pulling donor lists or mailing lists, there's a lot that one can do there.
For Salesforce, the major feature, especially in the advent of the Nonprofit Cloud, is its fully native data architecture for nonprofits. This was available in the past, with NPSP and the other packages for, like, volunteers (I also referenced the program management module earlier because we work in that space a lot). But with the Nonprofit Cloud, it’s all built in and makes implementing different areas of your organization more accessible. It speaks a lot to consultants like me since it’s designed to advise folks to implement Salesforce in a phased manner.
That's a huge strength of the system. You can be very iterative with it and it's very customizable. You can get Salesforce and start by implementing it for your fundraising team. Then, once you're ready, you can implement it for your program management, your volunteers, and so on.
I think the other main feature that is just so important is the ability to integrate. There are so many other interesting and powerful tools that nonprofits use for taking payments for their donations which is a business-critical need, for marketing to their donors and their constituents, for text messaging them, I could go on. The relative ease of integrating that data and getting a much richer profile of your constituents is one of the major pros of using Salesforce.
S: When thinking about a project as large and important as migrating CRMs, in your experience, what are the most common pitfalls or roadblocks that you typically encounter in this process? Are there steps people often overlook?
R: The main challenge folks face is really understanding the complexity of this type of project.
It always varies based on the client and the organization, how old their organization is, and how much data they have. Certainly, these factors all influence the success of a migration project and how quickly one can make it happen.
But in terms of common pitfalls, it's often not taking time to outline a timeline and expectations - meaning the nonprofit's expectations - for what the end product needs to be. A lot of that comes down to process building internally and I think that's what a lot of consultants can help with as well because clients don't know what they don't know, they're not expected to be experts in Salesforce.
Being thoughtful, keeping an open mind, and doing a little homework can help mitigate those challenges. Encouraging people to do their own research empowers them to feel like educated consumers, and that goes a long way.
A common scenario is hearing a client has a tight budget and a rushed timeline, say, three months. Instead of scrambling to fit that mold, take the time to be thoughtful and deliberate. Mismanaged expectations can cause serious harm.
S: Given all these important points about timeline, planning, and organization, walk us through, at a high level, what a typical migration project looks like. What can people expect out of the process?
R: First things first, it's really helpful to have a partner in this. Whether that is a consultant, an agency, or someone internally who has expertise, it’s going to be very useful just to have an expert who can guide you through not only the build but also in procuring licenses and advising on what applications you might need now or in the future, including any integrations.
As for the process itself, it always starts with a thorough discovery and review of the current tech stack. Ultimately, it's not about Blackbaud vs. Salesforce because the platform used is irrelevant if the nonprofit’s needs aren’t clear. The question to ask is: what do you want to create new, and what works now that you want to keep?
Having this identified helps create the roadmap of what needs to be built. Salesforce itself is super flexible, and it has a lot in place to meet some of the immediate needs.
But every nonprofit is different so super thorough discovery and expectation setting is always key for the work that we do - for really any project - but especially a migration because from there you have the task of moving the data, which is, of course, not a one to one correlation. What is a “Contact” in Raiser’s Edge is a “Person Account” on the Nonprofit Cloud and a “Gift” in Raiser's Edge is an “Gift Transaction” or “Opportunity” in Salesforce. So, thoroughly mapping out how those objects link before starting a data migration saves a lot of headaches later in the process. It becomes your thesaurus. This ensures the same data and functionality are carried across.
But, going back to my initial point, the idea in these transitions is not just to copy and paste the exact functionality that your team is used to into a new system. It's an opportunity to optimize and do things better.
So outside of just getting the full scope of what the client has and what they want, I think it's about them also looking at their processes and thinking, "Where can we improve here and where can we try to simplify?” It’s a chance to break that status quo. Again, working with a consultant or partner in this scenario helps nonprofits make the most of all the functionality and possible customizations that Salesforce offers.
S: Riley, your insights have been so valuable and you’ve been very generous with your time. Before closing off, do you have any other advice or resources you’d like to share?
R: I could probably talk for another half hour on this. It's been so great having this conversation, Sebastian, and my main piece of advice is just for folks to be educated consumers. There is so much information out there like what we put together today.
So many amazing consultancies with really bright folks are working to create great content, and Salesforce itself has a free platform, Trailhead, where people can learn about the tool and play around with hands-on exercises. It can be overwhelming because there is so much information but use that to your advantage and take the time to research and make sure that you have all your questions answered before you move forward with such a big project.
S: Thanks, Riley! Always a pleasure chatting with you.
R: Thanks!
Wrapping Up
There’s so much insight in the answers Riley provided that apply beyond CRM migrations. These takeaways can be used for any technology project and are good reminders of the best practices we can all follow. In summary:
- Consider long-term advantages over short-term challenges by asking probing questions.
- Look for areas where excessive workarounds are hindering daily tasks as indicators of outgrowing your current system.
- Understand that any undertaking will be complex and resource-intensive. Manage expectations accordingly.
- Think of migration projects as an opportunity to optimize processes, not merely replicate existing ones. Be creative.
- Invest the time to research and ask clarifying questions before embarking on a significant technology project. Resources are abundant, use them.
- Approach projects with an open mind, engaging your team and using the opportunity to grow as an organization.
We would like to extend our deep appreciation for Riley’s time in this interview. Many valuable insights were shared about the nature of data migration projects, how to select tools given your needs, and actionable steps to kick off your own data migration project.
iATS Payments by Deluxe partners with organizations like iMission Institute to bring actionable best practices to our nonprofit clients. As a payment processor dedicated exclusively to nonprofits, we believe in the power of collaboration and community to deliver long-term and holistic solutions that help nonprofits pursue their missions.
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