A growing non-profit · Fundraising operations
A CRM the team had quietly stopped using, rebuilt around how they actually work.
What they asked for
Light-touch operations support for a fundraising team raising several million a year, with a bigger target ahead. They wanted clearer priorities, better forward planning, and to know who does what. There was a CRM in place. Nobody was using it.
What was actually going on
The CRM wasn't a data problem, it was a trust problem. The team had been asked to use it, and had quietly carried on with their spreadsheet instead, asking me to do the data entry. To them it felt like extra work rather than time saved, and they were right: the same information was being typed into three places, the funding database, the CRM and the cash flow forecast, and none of them talked to each other. Senior fundraisers were spending their time on admin.
What we built
We rebuilt the CRM so it held everything the excel database did, giving the team one place to look up a funder instead of three. Each opportunity now shows how likely it is and when the money is expected, so the pipeline gives a realistic picture at a glance, with dashboards and saved views by level of risk. Then we drew a clear line around what it's for: relationships and opportunities, not forecasting. The forecast stayed in the spreadsheet, because trying to make one system do both is how you end up with neither.
What changed
It took a while to bed in (not the three months everyone hoped for), that’s what happens when a team has grown with fragmented systems. But it stuck, and together with the rest of the work, it gave senior time back to fundraising. As their Senior Fundraising Lead put it: "you have freed up senior fundraising capacity to focus on generating income.