New CRM? Prep your Systems for Success

Moving into a new fundraising CRM is a important opportunity to organize and optimize your data, much like moving into a new house.

You can rush the move, box up everything quickly and shove it all into the new place, or you can use the move as a chance to be intentional, deciding what to keep, what to adjust, and how it fits best in the new space.

Your couch might have worked fine in the old house, but in the new space it doesn't fit. And that junk drawer? You can dump everything into a new drawer and plan to deal with it later, or you can make time to sort through it and only keep what you need.

Migrating to a CRM like Bloomerang requires a similar decision. It's an opportunity to think strategically about how your entire data system should work.

This isn't just a nice-to-have. It's essential if your new system is ever going to live up to the reason you moved in the first place.

Most organizations don't realize which choice they made until a few months later, when things still feel off. The gift codes are jumbled. Constituents are still unorganized. Reports still aren't quite accurate. Custom fields are cluttered.

Moving your data into a powerful, user-friendly system like Bloomerang is an important first step. The work that follows determines whether your new system is effectively structured to deliver better results than before:

→ Restructuring your data to fit the way Bloomerang works, not the way your old system did
→ Finally tackling the cleanup you've been putting off for years: outdated emails, duplicate households, constituents who haven't engaged in a decade
→ Building the stewardship workflows you've always meant to create
→ Rethinking gift categorization so your reports finally give you the consistency you need

This can be harder work than the migration itself. But it's the work that makes the difference between a system your team tolerates and one they trust.