When a Donor Database Needs to Become Something More
Sometimes the sign that you have outgrown a fundraising system is not the number of records. It is the complexity of the organization that has grown around them.
Glen Kendell, Founder and CEO of Concourse Cloud, asked me a question on Data and Confused that I spent a good part of my career answering.
“What did Blackbaud CRM do that Raiser’s Edge did not?”
Or, put another way, when would an organization reach the point where Raiser’s Edge was no longer enough?
There are technical answers to that question.
Performance matters. Security matters. Scale matters. Architecture matters. But I think there is another answer that is probably more useful today.
Sometimes the organization has simply become more complicated than the original idea of a donor database.
A donor may not just be a donor.
One of the things I used to hear was some version of: “That record should not be in the system because the person has never given us a gift.”
I understand the thinking. If the system is understood primarily as a donor database, then the people in it should be donors. But that model begins to break down fairly quickly. Someone may be a donor. They may also be a volunteer. An attorney. A parent. A board member. A corporate contact. A foundation representative. A spouse of a major donor.
Someone connected to several other people the organization cares about. The more complicated the organization becomes, the more important those relationships become.
Now we are no longer only asking whether a person has given. We want to understand how people and organizations connect to one another. We may also need to control who can see which portions of that information.
Glen and I talked about an example I remember from a prospect that wanted volunteer staff working with records while still limiting access to sensitive information.
That sounds like a security feature. It is.
But the need came from the operating model.
The organization had different kinds of people doing different kinds of work with the same broader constituent community. The technology needed to reflect that.
Scale shows up in the fundraising model too. The other side of the question is growth. And I do not mean only database size. When I was working with nonprofits in sales, one of the first things I liked to understand was where the revenue came from.
Look at the mix.
Events. Membership. Annual giving. Major gifts. Capital campaigns. Peer-to-peer fundraising. Tributes. Recurring gifts. Planned giving.
Those are not interchangeable. Each one creates different processes. Different staffing. Different information requirements. Different stewardship.
An organization with a modest membership program may only need the system to handle basic member information. Another organization may depend heavily on membership revenue and need sophisticated levels, benefits, renewals, retention programs, and service processes.
The feature might have the same name on a requirements spreadsheet. The importance of that feature to the organization could be completely different. That is why I have never loved technology selection as a giant exercise in checking boxes.
What actually needs to be ‘excellent’?
This came up in the conversation with Glen as well.
Does every capability need to be the best in the world? Probably not. There may be areas where good enough is actually good enough.
If an organization processes a small number of tribute gifts, it may not need the most sophisticated tribute-processing functionality in the market. If another organization processes thousands every month, that same capability may be central to the operation. The difference is not whether the feature exists. The difference is what happens to the organization if the feature does not work well. I think that is where leadership enters the technology discussion.
Where does most of the money come from? Which fundraising programs matter strategically? Where is growth happening? What cannot be allowed to break? What has become important enough that the technology needs to support it really well?
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I would want leadership to be able to answer those questions before the organization gets too far into product demonstrations. Otherwise every department understandably argues that its particular requirement should be first-class. Eventually you are asking a system to be everything to everyone.
Outgrowing the system is a legitimate possibility. I have made the argument many times that organizations should not immediately blame the software.
Actually, I still believe that.
Sometimes the process is broken. Sometimes the data is inconsistent. Sometimes adoption is weak. Sometimes leadership has never really agreed on the outcome.
A new system will not automatically repair any of that. But I do not want to take that argument so far that we pretend technology never becomes a constraint.
It does.
Sometimes the organization has genuinely grown beyond what a system was designed to support.
Maybe it needs a deeper relationship model.
Maybe security has become more complicated.
Maybe fundraising volume has increased dramatically.
Maybe there are more programs, more teams, and more people working with the same constituents.
Maybe work has moved outside the platform because people can no longer make the system reflect what the organization actually does.
Those are real signals, and the challenge is distinguishing them from frustration that is actually being created somewhere else.
Start with the organization.
If I were working through this decision today, I would probably begin in the same place I did years ago.
Show me how you raise money. Where does it come from? Which programs are growing? Who works with constituents? What roles do they play? What information needs to move across teams?
What should different people be allowed to see? Where are people doing work outside the system? What does the organization wish it could do that it genuinely cannot do today?
Then we can talk about whether the current technology has been outgrown. Maybe it has.
If so, great. Now we have a much clearer reason to change.
Maybe the exercise shows that the organization owns enough technology already and needs to improve the way it uses it. That is useful too.
The point, at least for me, is not to defend one product or recommend another before understanding the operation. It is to make the technology fit the work. That sounds obvious.
In practice, I think organizations skip over it more often than they realize.
Thank you to Glen Kendell and Concourse Cloud for the opportunity to revisit some of these questions on Data and Confused. I enjoyed getting into the product history, but I appreciated even more where the conversation went once we started asking what the history means for nonprofit leaders today.
What changed first in your organization: the volume of the data, the complexity of the relationships, or the way fundraising itself became more complicated?
This is Part 2 of my September series based on my conversation with Glen Kendell on Data and Confused.
Full episode:
For conversations around CRM strategy, fundraising technology, data, and organizational growth, connect with me on LinkedIn or through IBW Solutions.
