Implementing a CRM solution is a critical step in setting up your institution for success. Having the right CRM system in place means improved communication and enhanced relationships, streamlined daily operations, your team being able to collaborate and work more efficiently, and management being able to have a clear view of your alumni, donors, and constituents.
Marquette University is a Catholic, Jesuit university located near the heart of downtown Milwaukee, WI, that offers a comprehensive range of majors in 11 nationally and internationally recognized colleges and schools. We had outgrown our legacy CRM system and decided to implement a new system that allowed us to achieve our goals of supporting the university’s growing fundraising needs and empowering users from across all 11 colleges with a consistent, comprehensive user experience. Our new CRM solution is successfully bringing together departments across campus and gives us a true 360-degree view of our alumni, donors, and constituents.
When you’re moving from one solution to another remember that you are moving for a reason —don’t try to make the new system your old system – if your old system met all your needs, you wouldn’t be converting. As you transition, keep in mind there are going to be headaches, things in your new system that you can’t do, and that soon it will afford you 100+ other opportunities that your old system couldn’t.
When implementing a new system, there’s often a tendency to recreate the same processes and experience as your old system. If you want you make your new system exactly like your old system, then you’re not ready for a new system. Change is hard. The reality is that if you want to move your institution forward, then change is necessary. At the end of the day, it’s a trade-off to modernize your technology and transition to a new system.
Here are a few best practices I learned throughout our experience that can help your team ensure a successful implementation:
I. Identify Your Implementation Planning Strategy
• Determine critical needs for go live. As a group we met to discuss what each department felt was a critical need, and from there we outlined and prioritized the critical needs.
• Identify any phase 2 or 3 items. We identified any items that could be included in phase 2 or phase 3, which would happen after we went live.
• Determine resources and resource availability. We decided to leverage additional Blackbaud support due to limited resources on staff, hired a developer to work on customizations, and increased the hours for our student interns so they could assist with data entry at go live.
• Outline and share expedited timeline. During our conversion we had to make the tough decision to go live four months earlier than planned due to PCI compliance issues in our legacy system. We updated the timeline to ensure it was realistic and shared with executive leadership. It was important to have the buy-in of our executive leadership because we were not four months ahead of schedule and we needed their support as we continue to work through project-related items while we are live in the new CRM.
• Communicate, complete transparency. We communicated to all departments what would be ready for go live and what would be pushed to phase 2 or 3; and provided new deadlines for phase 2 and phase 3.
• Reset expectations with key stakeholders. Throughout the project we continued to reset expectations with key stakeholders for areas that we knew were important to them, such as which reports would be ready, etc. There were key customizations that would have ideally been ready at go live, but given that we accelerated our project timeline by four months, we knew that they wouldn’t all be ready. For our work, our new student and parent import, scholarship recipient imports and converting students to graduates happen at the same time each year and since they were each several months after our expedited go live we knew that we could go live without them being finished as long as they were ready as their time in the calendar approached.
II. Cost of Delay – Financial and Human Impacts
If we chose to delay, we would’ve needed to recruit additional resources to assist with upgrading our former CRM system. A delay would mean that we would be a lot less productive on the project as we would be putting our time and resources toward the upgrade. Project momentum would come to a standstill during this time, which would potentially push out the original go live date. Another consideration was the loss of skillset and needing to retrain employees as well as burnout and turnover.
You could also run the risk of stakeholders losing confidence in the leadership team, project, and the software. There were substantial increased costs with delay, including upgrade, servers, etc.
III. How to Avoid Pushing Go Live
The number one way to avoid pushing the go live date is to ensure executive support – the people that will back your decisions and ensure the correct resources are available when you need them to be. Ensure expectations of resource usage and that critical needs are outlined in a way that there leaves no room for confusion.
Your timelines must be attainable. Utilize interns and temp staff that you can easily train on simple tasks, i.e. data processing, or get additional help from your technology provider.
Be ready for resistance – you’re always going to have people who preferred the legacy system. You are moving to a new system for a reason – because you have grown larger than your legacy system, the functionality no longer meets your needs or any other host of reasons which should be an indicator that you don’t need to make your new system exactly like your old system. If there are things not critical to daily business operations, don’t push your go live to recreate them, rather spend time in your new system to determine if there is a better or new way to do something.
IV. Considerations for After Your Go Live Date
Stop and take a deep breath, your system may not be where you want it to be right after your system goes live, but it will get there. Stress to all parties involved that just because the system is live it doesn’t mean the project is finished. Set timelines and make sure all parties adhere to them. Don’t forget to set expectations for staff not involved in the project.
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Understand you can’t be where you want to be on day one. A CRM system is constantly changing and evolving, it has live data. It’s ok to not have everything ready and where it needs to be, it takes time. Give yourself the grace of time needed to get there.
V. Lessons Learned
• Test as early as possible
• Train as late as possible
• Communication is critical
• Changing business process and culture is difficult, but ultimately yields the best possible result
Read how other universities are also achieving organizational success with the right technology in the customer stories on the Blackbaud Higher Education content hub.
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