A CRM strategy should be a strategic nerve centre, but is your charity CRM solution up to the job?
Some believe their CRM solution should be like a digital filing cabinet for storing and sorting their contacts (donors). This mindset seriously underestimates the power of a charity management software solution in today’s charity world.
In this hyper-connected digital landscape, the best-in-class CRMs for UK charities are no longer mere databases. Rather, they operate as central hubs that facilitate data exchange between various platforms while offering a seamless integration to produce a frictionless work environment. A truly connected CRM UK system eliminates operational silos and bridges the gap between donor, supporter, and fundraiser.
Your CRM should be the starting point of a technology ecosystem that powers your charity. A truly connected system will help you build and maintain strong relationships with your supporters.
The charity CRM: A tale of two decades
Charities a decade ago worked in a dramatically different technological landscape than they do today. Back then, organisations relied on an array of separate platforms, including spreadsheets, manual processes, and standalone software solutions. However, with the advancements of the CRM software in recent years, forward-thinking charities have made a complete overhaul and unified a network of advanced, interconnected tools that work seamlessly together.
For instance, picture the day of a charity manager that operates their CRM alongside separate disconnected systems:
- They start their day by checking their email platform for any new sign-ups to add to their CRM manually.
- Then they check notifications from their payment processor to enter manually any donations received.
- Later, they export a list of donors from their CRM to create a segment in their email platform for a fundraising campaign.
- Then they switch to their accounting software to update transactional data from the payments platform.
- Finally, they collect social media stats from all the different platforms to see how the fundraising campaign performed on social media.
This is a day in the life of a charity working with systems that don’t connect. It’s a day filled with mundane data entry, double-keying information, and leaving plenty of room for error and oversight.
The best-in-class connected CRMs empower charities to:
- Add a new email subscriber, and the CRM automatically registers them with their complete engagement history from other platforms.
- Accept a donation, and the information flows automatically into both the CRM and accounting software, including donor attribution and campaign tracking.
- Launch an email campaign directly from the CRM against segments they’ve defined in the CRM, with all the engagement data flowing back into the CRM to enrich donor profiles.
Every social media interaction ties into their supporter record in the CRM, providing a 360-degree view of the relationship.
These are the kinds of day-in-the-life moments we hear all the time at System Strongholds from charities that have truly unified their technology stack around their CRM hub. The stark difference is that a connected system empowers the charity worker to do their job better and have more time to grow the organisation, rather than serve as a data entry operator.
Hub and spoke: Does your charity CRM connect to or control?
By viewing a charity CRM as a central hub rather than a stand-alone database, we challenge the traditional feature-centric approach of technology selection and implementation.
In this model, instead of looking for a Swiss Army knife tool that aspires to do everything reasonably well, we embrace the concept of a strategic nerve centre with spokes that reach out into the best-in-class applications for each function. The CRM’s role is not to perform all tasks better than other specialised platforms but rather to ensure that these different tools can communicate with each other, exchange data, and present a unified view of overall performance.
This concept offers multiple benefits compared to a legacy CRM system with extensive features that try to be everything to everyone:
Firstly, it provides organisations the flexibility to choose the best tool for the job rather than settling for suboptimal functionality within a feature-heavy, one-size-fits-all platform. An organisation might prefer Mailchimp as their email marketing solution over the native functionality in their CRM; they might prefer Stripe over the payment processor within their CRM. Meanwhile, their finance team prefers Xero for accounting to the CRM-native accounting software. In this approach, all these different software can work seamlessly together with the CRM as the central data repository.
Secondly, a hub-and-spoke model is much more flexible and scalable as the organisation grows and changes over time. Needs change, and tools can be swapped out or added as needed without impacting the overall system’s integrity.
Finally, this model future-proofs your charity against technological obsolescence and vendor lock-in. Rather than being tied to the roadmap and feature set of one vendor for all their needs, you can adapt and upgrade your technology stack as the ecosystem changes. The CRM central hub ensures data continuity and minimises disruption.
Payment Processors: The Financial Backbone of Modern Fundraising
Payment Services
Stripe is a payment gateway and processing platform known for its developer-friendly API and extensive features. It allows charities to accept donations through a variety of channels including their website, mobile app, social media, and even at physical events. Stripe can be seamlessly integrated into a centralised CRM hub so that every transaction can be used to better understand and serve donors. The integration can capture not just the amount and date of a donation but also the campaign source, donor preferences, payment method, and context of engagement.
Stripe’s integration with a CRM hub can also power sophisticated automation workflows. For example, a new donor who gives a gift through a Stripe-powered donation form on the website can trigger an automated welcome email series, be added to specific segments, have follow-up tasks created for development staff, and receive predictive recommendations for the best time to next ask, all without manual intervention.
GoCardless is a payment gateway that specialises in Direct Debit payments. For UK charities looking to build a recurring gift program, GoCardless is a great tool. The integration with a CRM hub provides charities with the ability to better manage their regular giving relationships, automate failure handling, optimise payment dates, and create donor communications that are triggered by payment events. For example, if a Direct Debit payment fails, the CRM system can automatically pause email communications, alert development staff to take direct action, and provide donors with a simple way to update their payment details.
Payment processors like Stripe and GoCardless are critical components of the modern charitable tech stack. When these services are properly integrated into a central CRM hub, they provide organisations with rich, multidimensional data that can be leveraged to power a wide range of use cases. By linking every transaction to a donor record, charities can create holistic profiles that offer deep insights into their supporter base.
A Holistic View of Donors
CRM systems for charities serve as the central repository of donor information, collecting data from a wide range of sources such as online donations, direct mail responses, event registrations, and social media interactions. This centralised data storage allows charity organisations to maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date view of their donors, capturing critical information such as contact details, giving history, communication preferences, engagement activities, and any other relevant notes. By consolidating all this information in one place, a CRM system enables organisations to have a holistic and complete picture of their donors.
Donor management software gives charity communicators and fundraisers a 360-degree view of donors.
With a holistic view of each donor, charity communicators can personalise interactions at scale, tailoring messages and campaigns to individual preferences and behaviours. This level of personalisation helps build stronger and more meaningful relationships with donors, leading to increased engagement and donor retention. Additionally, by segmenting donors based on various criteria (e.g., donation levels, interests, or engagement history), organisations can target specific groups with tailored content and offers, further enhancing the effectiveness of their communication efforts.
Accounting Software: Financial Transparency and Compliance
Accounting software like Xero is a great platform for charities to use due to its open API, cloud native design and fully online access. You can learn how to connect Xero to a CRM hub and automate your integration here.
Charities registered in the UK are regulated by the Charity Commission. We are required to demonstrate public trust and accountability through transparency of our fundraising performance. For most UK registered charities, this means the connection of all transactions between the fundraising technology stack and an accounting software. Why? So that the fundraising expenses and donations received can be accounted for, reconciled, audited, reported and demonstrate the responsible stewardship of our fundraising operations.
Charity accounting integrations support reporting on both the expenses for individual campaigns, the returns from those campaigns, and also the ROI for those campaigns. We can use these accounting reports and analysis to identify campaign performance and perhaps explore under- and overperforming campaigns to improve our campaigns and decision making around our limited resource. Charities also have a legal responsibility to report and comply with fund restrictions, and our accounting systems can help track that compliance as well. This level of financial insight is difficult, if not impossible, without a strong link between the CRM and an accounting software like Xero.
Annual returns and other regulatory reporting is made so much easier by consolidating fundraising performance into the accounting software as well. Without the CRM-fundraising tech integration, this process would require manual compilation of a lot of performance data, putting unnecessary burden and risk on charity organisations and management.
From Raising Awareness to Driving Donations: Measuring Social Media ROI
Measuring the impact of social media marketing and fundraising is challenging. Traditional ROI models, which focus on direct revenue generation, are often ill-suited to capture the multi-faceted value of social media activities. This can lead to underinvestment in social media efforts or support for initiatives that are not aligned with strategic objectives.
To effectively measure the ROI of social media, organizations should define key performance indicators (KPIs) tailored to their specific objectives. Engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments are valuable measures of awareness and sentiment, but they must be balanced with conversion metrics like donation page clicks and actual donations. Organisations can also use UTM codes and tracking links to monitor the performance of specific social media campaigns and posts.
Advanced CRM systems with social media integrations provide powerful tools for tracking and analyzing social media ROI. By consolidating data from all engagement channels, these systems enable a holistic view of the supporter journey from first contact through to donation. Integrated analytics dashboards can track social media engagement, conversion rates, and donation value over time, as well as segment data by supporter demographics, interests, or previous engagement history. This level of insight can reveal which types of content or campaigns are most effective at driving donations, and enable data-driven decisions for future social media planning.
Social media integrations with CRM also offer more nuanced ways of measuring and optimising social media investment. For example, automated marketing automation workflows can be configured to measure the cost of acquisition for new donors acquired via social media, and compare this against the value of their lifetime gifts. Integrations can also enable new experiments like A/B testing and ROI modelling for paid social advertising, which can help optimise paid media spend.
The full value of social media in the context of CRM goes beyond immediate donation results. Social media is a vital source of intelligence about supporter interests, concerns, and behaviours. Social media engagement data helps to build richer, more complete supporter profiles that are the basis for segmentation and targeting decisions. This data can also be used to personalise supporter communications, whether on social media or other channels like email or SMS. Personalised, relevant engagement is key to creating loyal, long-term supporters.
Overall, social media and CRM integration enables a level of data-driven decision making that would be difficult to achieve with manual processes or disparate systems. By combining insights from across all engagement channels and using them to optimise all marketing and fundraising activities, organizations can ensure their social media efforts are as effective as possible.
Streamlining Workflows: Stop The Double-Entry Data Madness
The single biggest productivity win for charities when moving to an integrated software ecosystem is the elimination of double entry. In an organisation with siloed tech, employees spend their days needlessly re-entering the same data in different systems. Staff who know better write the same data twice. And other staff write the same data twice because no one knows better.
The data in the case of a donation journey is often copied from the online form into the CRM by hand, then transcribed into the accounting system and possibly into the email marketing system. If the donor is not already on a list, but should be, another employee must find the list or create one and then add the donor to the list. If the donor needs to be added to the “gold” donor list for a stewardship call, another hand will need to make that update.
Siloed systems have serious consequences that go beyond general inefficiency. Duplicate data creates duplicates records, inconsistent data and incomplete supporter records. Hours of employees’ time each week are squandered on mundane and repetitive data entry. Worse yet, from a stewardship perspective, by the time all of the systems are updated with a supporter’s data, the information is often already out of date, and thus useless for time-sensitive marketing, fundraising, or stewardship campaigns.
Integrated systems solve all of these problems by design. Data entry is reduced to a single instance in the integrated system. For example, when a donation is recorded in Stripe, the transactional data populates to CRM including all of the associated donor data. At the same time, that same data automatically pushes to the accounting system, with transaction categories automatically populated. Emails go out automatically to supporters, or send them into email marketing workflows for further stewardship actions. Staff get tasks that they need to do assigned to them based on the transaction data. All of this can happen in seconds with no human intervention.
When data entry is no longer required it is possible to track how many fewer hours staff need to spend on the work. Generally, organisations can expect to see time spent on data management drop by 60-80% by consolidating data entry into a single action and automating integrations. More importantly, this time is no longer spent on data entry and can be used for other work, most importantly, work related to building and growing donor relationships, creating programmes, and strategising for the future.
Achieving a Single Source of Truth
One of the most powerful by-products of a connected charity CRM system is the creation of a “single source of truth” for all supporter data. In disconnected systems, the same supporters may have different, and sometimes conflicting, records in various platforms. This creates confusion, leads to ineffective communications, and results in missed opportunities. In a CRM hub system, the supporter record is held only in one authoritative location (the CRM), and other systems update from the CRM and return data to it.
A single source of truth offers a range of advantages for a charity. Development teams can see the full history of a supporter without having to search several systems, allowing for more effective management of relationships. Marketing teams can create accurate segments based on holistic profiles of supporters and improve the targeting and performance of their campaigns. Finance teams can produce reports that include fundraising, accounting, and engagement data in one place, offering a complete view of performance.
The single source of truth also makes it possible to deliver more powerful analytics and reporting. Instead of trying to join and reconcile data from disparate systems, a charity can pull reports from their CRM hub. A CRM can draw together information on donation history, email engagement, social media interactions, event attendance, and volunteering to create a full profile of supporters. This also allows for the identification of trends that would otherwise be invisible.
The single source of truth also vastly improves the quality and consistency of the data being used by a charity. When a data field is updated in the CRM, it cascades to all connected systems, ensuring that supporters receive consistent communications and experiences no matter where they engage with the organisation. This is essential for maintaining professional credibility and supporter confidence.
Implementation Strategies for Maximum Integration Success
The successful implementation of an integrated charity management software ecosystem requires a combination of meticulous planning, strategic prioritization, and a phased approach. Attempting to integrate all systems simultaneously often leads to technical glitches, staff resistance, and data quality issues, potentially derailing the entire initiative. A more strategic approach involves prioritising integrations based on their potential impact and complexity, starting with high-value, low-risk integrations and gradually moving to more complex implementations.
The first step in any successful integration project is a thorough audit of existing systems and data quality. This audit helps organisations understand what data they currently maintain, where it resides, and how it flows between different platforms. This process often uncovers data quality issues that need to be addressed before integration can be effective. Duplicate records, inconsistent formatting, and incomplete information can cause significant problems in integrated systems, so data cleanup is an essential prerequisite for successful integration.
Once data quality issues have been addressed, organisations should prioritize integrations based on their potential impact and implementation complexity. The integration of payment processors and CRM systems is often the highest return on investment with relatively straightforward implementation. Email marketing integrations are a close second, offering immediate benefits for supporter communications and engagement tracking. Integrations with accounting systems, while highly valuable, often require more careful planning due to the complexity of financial data and regulatory requirements.
Staff training and change management are critical success factors that are often underestimated in integration projects. Even the most sophisticated technical integration will fail if staff members do not understand how to use the new capabilities effectively. Organisations should invest in comprehensive training programmes that not only cover technical procedures but also explain the strategic benefits of integration and how it supports the organisation’s mission.
Measuring Success: KPIs for Integrated Systems
The success of an integrated CRM for UK charities ecosystem should be measured using specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect both operational efficiency gains and mission impact improvements. Traditional metrics like database size or email open rates, while still relevant, don’t capture the full value of integration. Organisations need more sophisticated measurement frameworks that assess the holistic benefits of connected systems.
Operational efficiency metrics should focus on time savings, error reduction, and process automation. Organisations should track the time required for common tasks like donor data entry, campaign setup, and report generation, comparing pre- and post-integration performance. Error rates in data management, duplicate record creation, and financial reconciliation provide additional indicators of integration success. The percentage of manual processes that have been automated offers another valuable metric for assessing operational improvements.
Data quality metrics become increasingly important in integrated environments where poor data can cascade across multiple systems. Organisations should monitor duplicate record rates, data completeness scores, and consistency measures across integrated platforms. The time required to generate comprehensive reports combining data from multiple sources provides another indicator of integration effectiveness.
From a mission impact perspective, integrated systems should enable more effective supporter engagement and relationship management. Metrics like donor retention rates, average gift sizes, email engagement scores, and supporter lifetime value should improve as organisations leverage integrated data for more targeted and personalised communications. The speed of supporter onboarding and stewardship processes also provides valuable indicators of integration success.
CRM Hubs and the Future of Charitable Technology Platforms
The technology platforms and capabilities available to charitable organisations are changing rapidly, with frequent announcements of new platforms, features, and integrations. Many solutions are built around proprietary, monolithic technology that locks organisations in and limits their ability to adapt as their needs and the technology landscape evolves. Hub-based charity management software offers built-in flexibility, allowing organisations to develop technology stacks over time as their needs change.
To future-proof their technology stack, organisations should start with a CRM platform that is built for integration and has an open architecture. Look at the integration capabilities of potential CRM solutions including the quality of the platform’s API, the maturity of their integration marketplace, and their history of enabling third-party integrations. When comparing CRM options, ensure that the vendor understands the value of integrations and is actively encouraging development of new integrations using their technology.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is one rapidly developing set of technologies that has great potential for the charitable sector. AI is quickly becoming available for donor prospect research, predictive analytics, optimising communications and much more. To benefit from AI and ML tools, charitable organisations need access to rich data sets; that’s where an integrated, data-centred CRM comes in. The future of the sector is going to be increasingly influenced by AI and ML, and the organisation with a tightly integrated technology stack will be best able to adapt.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency donations are another emerging area where integrations with your CRM and finance platform will be an advantage as they gain acceptance. As soon as a cryptocurrency is established enough to be worth considering accepting donations, the organisation with an agile, integration-focused stack will be best positioned to take advantage.
Conclusion
Charitable technology has come a long way from the days of one-off, siloed systems. Modern solutions are moving toward becoming integrated ecosystems that coordinate with a wide variety of other platforms to efficiently manage supporter data, enable key business processes and deliver more impact. The effective charity CRM solution has become less about which features are built into one platform and more about its ability to operate as a central hub for data integration between specialised tools.
Evidence from early adopters has shown again and again that organisations that embrace this hub model and prioritise integration from the start consistently outperform others. They no longer need to duplicate information between systems, creating a single source of truth that staff can rely on and that powers more powerful analysis and decision-making. They reduce administrative time and effort significantly, making work like fund processing and mailings faster and easier. Most importantly, they free up staff time from mundane administrative work and enable them to focus on the relationship building and mission-critical work that has the greatest impact.
Building an integrated technology stack takes planning, good implementation, and an ongoing commitment to data quality and training. However, the returns in terms of saved time, improved supporter engagement, financial transparency, and mission impact are well worth the investment.
Supporter expectations for technology, transparency, and results continue to increase as the sector continues to modernise. The organisations that are going to thrive in the years to come are going to be the ones that recognise that the power of their CRM system does not come from what it can do alone but what it can connect to. The future of the charitable sector is going to be built by organisations that focus on building technology ecosystems instead of simply buying software solutions—and the future is here for those organisations who are ready to take an integrated approach to charity management software.
The question for charity managers is no longer if they are going to integrate systems but how quickly they can put this connected approach into practice to set themselves up for future success. The technology is available, the benefits are proven, and the competitive advantages are large. The only question remaining is whether your organisation will lead this change or fall behind those who recognise that in today’s charitable sector, connection is everything.
