Direct Impact Digital Exclusive
Bridging the Gap with CARE: Staffing Strategies to Unify Fundraising & Tech Teams
The modern nonprofit fundraising apparatus, particularly in direct response, relies on rich, actionable data on donors and prospects that support intelligent, responsive segmentation, messaging tailored to donor expectations and interests, and carefully crafted donor experiences. Yet in conversations with nonprofit colleagues and clients, nearly all point to a disconnect between their fundraising teams and marketing technology/donor database teams as one of their most significant pain points.
When I tell the story of Skeleton Key’s consulting work, I find that what clients initially describe as a technology problem almost never turns out to be about technology at all. What we uncover beneath an organization’s self-described tech woes are usually interpersonal issues, where gaps or breakdowns in structure and process play out in human dynamics between teams. Whether about redefining ways of working (decision making, governance, collaboration) or navigating tensions inherent in managing cross-functional technology ecosystems (ownership, prioritization, strategic alignment), a CRM transformation creates opportunity for organizations to fundamentally reassess and realign their workflows and staffing to enable technology success — and protect their investment.
The Solution that Introduces New Problems
Over the last decade, many nonprofits have shifted away from fundraising-specific platforms like Blackbaud toward corporate-scale CRM and marketing technologies like Salesforce and HubSpot. This trend has cut our industry both ways, positioning nonprofits to leverage best-in-class engagement platforms to amplify fundraising efforts — particularly in digital and mass market channels — while introducing new data model challenges and tech product management questions many organizations aren’t prepared to address until after they’re live on a new CRM.
Unlike their nonprofit-specific counterparts, which often offer supporting services like user training, data management, or custom reporting, corporate-scale CRMs like Salesforce rarely come with a “service bureau .”
Organizations moving to these platforms may have more sophisticated business requirements, and therefore higher expectations of what the tech will enable.
The gap between what fundraising teams expect from a new CRM and what that CRM offers opens quickly. Mismanaged expectations immediately following a CRM go-live can crater users’ trust in a system or its data so dramatically, it can take years to recover. It’s between this rock-and-a-hard-place that CARE found itself in 2023, leading them to approach Skeleton Key to help explore potential new organizational models to support its Salesforce NPSP fundraising CRM.
CARE’s Challenge & Opportunity
In 2023, CARE’s CRM Team (housed in its Digital/IT department) and fundraising department (Resource Development, or RD) were fatigued from multiple years of complex CRM migrations. They brought on nonprofit consultancy Cake Byte to assess CARE’s use of Salesforce, subsequently engaging me to lay out organizational design options. Following those preliminary designs, CARE engaged me to lead a full CRM Organizational Design Assessment through fall and winter 2023-2024, where I interviewed over 50 CARE staff members to understand goals and pain points related to CRM.
Working with CARE’s Chief Information Officer and AVP of Operations, Planning & Analysis in RD, we identified three critical issues:
- Trust and communication were breaking down, with business requirements getting lost in translation between RD and Digital, and competing priorities becoming bones of contention.
- Users felt unsupported while the CRM Team felt overwhelmed. RD support ticket backlogs had ballooned, but the CRM Team’s overly broad remit meant user support couldn’t take higher priority.
- Data quality eroded trust while driving up workload, with no holistic ownership leading to duplicates and errors that reinforced mistrust in Salesforce data and increasing support ticket volume.
Our design preserved CARE’s Digital CRM Team structure while building crucial capacity within RD. We created role specialization opportunities for existing CRM technical staff and recommended additional capacity for marketing technology and data infrastructure. We also established a new Development Data & Systems (DDS) team in RD to serve as business-side partner to the Digital CRM Team.
This structure allowed shared, “programmatic" ownership of Salesforce NPSP, with technical teams focusing on administration while business-side teams led user support, training, and change management; prioritized and translated fundraising requirements; and provided dedicated data quality support. Commensurate with organizational investments across RD, we also roadmapped a phased, multi-year implementation of additional DDS roles to beef up the team’s business analysis, training, and analytics capacity over time. Crucially, we designed growth paths for existing staff rather than relying on net-new headcount, seeking to align staff interests and talents with CARE’s structural needs while retaining institutional knowledge.
Success also required addressing old cultural patterns alongside structural changes, with new leadership bringing industry expertise and best practices for co-managing technology programs. A dedicated user support role in DDS dramatically improved user experience, and a dedicated data quality role allowed fundraisers to spend more time on donor relationships than wrangling data issues. The DDS and CRM teams now meet weekly to discuss backlogs, roadblocks, and risks for quicker mitigation and proactive planning, with monthly sessions to maintain alignment between Salesforce development and RD’s evolving fundraising strategies.
Invest in Relationships, Not Just CRM
CARE’s CRM success depended on careful rethinking and reconfiguration of its people and processes, alongside its technology transformation. Technology alone cannot eliminate organizational blockers — sometimes, like in any relationship, we simply have to figure out better ways to cooperate with one another.
CARE’s experience can serve as a blueprint for integrated, cross-team technology management for organizations of any size. Even if CRM ownership is housed in the same team as its core users, bridging “translation and enablement" roles are essential to successful adoption and long-term growth of systems and workflows. But here’s the catch: systems typically reflect the level of harmony or discord of the organization around them, and systems can only help integrate teams when interpersonal obstacles to integration — workflows, structures, or cultures — are also identified and resolved as part of tech transformation. Organizations enjoying the least friction and most fundraising success with their CRM invest as much in staff abilities to manage change, build trust, and sustain dynamic partnerships as they do in the software itself.
Justin Birdsong is the Founder & Principal of Skeleton Key Strategies, unlocking agile nonprofits through technology, operations, and strategy consulting. He lives in Greenfield, MA with his husband and two cats. He’d love to hear from you at greetings@skeletonkeystrategies.com.