However, their ability to effectively support these causes is contingent botim database 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.
