Insights from CBA’s Coffee Chat Webinar, Stop Guessing: When to Fix or Replace Your Fundraising Tech. Watch the full webinar below, or read on for the key takeaways.

Is your CRM working for you, or against you? It’s a deceptively simple question, and one that anchored a recent CBA Coffee Chat on nonprofit technology strategy. Hosted by Christina McPhillips, VP of Client Partnerships at Carl Bloom Associates, the conversation featured Charity Jovanovic, CEO of Barker & Scott, and Jena Schaefer Blaustein, their Director of Technology and Managed Services; two experts who, between them, bring more than 60 years of nonprofit fundraising technology experience to the table.

What followed was one of the most grounded conversations we’ve had on this topic. Here are the insights worth keeping.

Start Here: What Does Success Actually Look Like?

Before forming a CRM committee, before requesting demos, before polling your staff, Charity says there’s one question every organization needs to answer first: What is your vision for your CRM, and what does success look like?

“If you can’t answer that question even at a high level, that is the first place I would start. It is going to be your North Star.”

Without that anchor, you risk spending months evaluating systems without knowing what you’re actually evaluating for. Your answer to that question, even a rough one, will tell you whether the right move is a configuration overhaul, a staff training investment, or a full platform replacement.

Red Flags Worth Taking Seriously

The panelists offered several concrete warning signs that your tech stack may be costing you more than you realize, even if day-to-day operations seem fine.

Your frontline staff is overwhelmed by manual tasks. If your team feels like they’re fighting the system to get the information they need to make decisions, that’s a red flag, regardless of what leadership observes from a distance.

Your data hygiene numbers are slipping. Two benchmarks to watch: duplicate records above 5% of your database, and email bounce rates above 2%. Most CRMs include a built-in data health check; use it as a diagnostic before investing in anything new.

Your team is exporting to Excel before every board meeting. Your CRM should generate those reports dynamically. If hours of manual manipulation are required to produce a clean dashboard, that’s a configuration problem, not necessarily a reason to buy a new system.

Tech Problem or Process Problem? (Usually Both)

This is one of the most common misdiagnoses in the sector. The honest answer, according to Charity, is usually all of the above. And the best way to find out is to listen to your team, not just development staff, but finance, marketing, and anyone else who touches the system.

Jena recommends getting an objective outside assessment from someone who can evaluate your CRM without a financial stake in whether you stay or switch. A good assessment will surface whether you’re leaving major functionality on the table, whether your data structure is getting in the way, or whether the real issue is insufficient training and support. For guidance on what to look for in that process, Barker & Scott offers a CRM Diagnostic & Assessment service designed to do exactly this kind of objective evaluation.

“We worked with a mid-size university foundation that was using less than 50% of what their CRM offered, and their fundraising strategy had changed completely since they first configured it.”

Rather than spending two years and significant dollars on a full migration, Barker & Scott helped them restructure and maximize what they already had, for a fraction of the cost. The lesson: don’t assume a new system will fix problems that are rooted in how the current one is configured or used.

The Myth of the Perfect CRM, and How to Shop Smart

There is no unicorn system. The belief that a perfect CRM exists, one that meets 100% of your needs without trade-offs, is one of the most damaging myths in the sector. As Charity put it, chasing that myth leads organizations to constantly feel like the grass is greener, which makes adoption harder and ROI lower on whatever platform they’re currently using.

When it is time to evaluate new platforms, Jena’s advice is to flip the demo dynamic entirely: don’t let vendors run their dog-and-pony show. Instead, come prepared, or send scripts in advance, with specific user stories and business process scenarios that reflect your actual workflows. Require all vendors to demo the same things so you can make a genuine apples-to-apples comparison. And always ask: is this native functionality, or does it require an additional tier or add-on to unlock?

A few platforms that came up in the conversation as options worth exploring (keeping in mind that the right fit depends heavily on your revenue streams, team skill set, and organizational culture): Bloomerang for smaller organizations focused on donor retention; Virtuous and Neon CRM for growing mid-market nonprofits; Bonterra EveryAction for organizations with strong direct mail programs; and Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT or Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud for larger, major-giving-focused operations. For a broader side-by-side comparison, Double the Donation’s CRM guide is a good starting point.

If You’re Making the Switch: What Not to Cut

A few hard-won insights on keeping fundraising revenue steady during a migration:

• Budget explicitly for your staff’s time. Don’t expect your team to run a CRM migration on top of their full workload without something suffering.
• Plan for system overlap. A month or two of parallel access between old and new systems is worth the extra cost, and it lets your team catch mapping errors and reduces the stress of cutover.
• Don’t skip data cleanup. Clean what you can in your current system before migration. If you rely on the migration process itself to do the heavy lifting, user-acceptance testing becomes significantly harder.
• Watch your timing. Avoid your peak fundraising season, but also don’t overlook your finance team’s audit season. Gift processing validation is a critical and often-overlooked piece of any migration.

For more on what a smart selection process looks like, CharityEngine’s nonprofit CRM checklist covers the key questions to ask before you head into vendor conversations.

The Road to AI Starts With Clean Data

With AI dominating the technology conversation, Charity and Jena offered a grounding reality check: AI, automation, and dynamic dashboards are all genuinely valuable, but they build on each other in sequence, and you can’t skip steps.

1. Get your data clean and reliable.
2. Build dashboards that refresh dynamically; no manual Excel exports required.
3. Layer in automation — automated acknowledgments, reports to key stakeholders, etc.
4. Then, and only then, consider AI tools.

“You’ll regret it if you try to jump from A to Z and go right to AI. The core of it is solid, reliable data.”

One attendee noted during the session that they were already considering a platform upgrade — but wisely, on a 12+ month horizon. That kind of long-range planning is exactly what the panelists were advocating.

Three Quick Self-Checks You Can Do This Week

• Survey your team. Use a free poll to ask development, finance, and marketing staff how they feel about data quality, functionality, and support. Their answers will be more revealing than any vendor demo.
• Check your contract renewal. Is your CRM subscription increasing by more than 10% at renewal? That data point may help you make your decision faster than months of research.
• Catalog your manual processes. List your key workflows and flag which ones are fully manual. If the majority are, that’s worth taking seriously.