Do you have RE champions within your organisation?

Stacey Addison

Hi everyone,


I am hoping that you can give me some ideas and tips on how to get the rest of the fundraising team invested in the use of RE. Do you have champions for each team that help reiterate new and improved aspects of the CRM? Do you hold regular training sessions? Unfortunately, we are going through the process of sorting out of data after years of misuse and I need ideas on how to get my colleagues excited about RE and how it can enhance our fundraising. Any ideas would be gratefully received. Thank you.


Stacey

Carrie Aranda

Hi Stacey! I was faced with the same issue when I started in my position 3.5 years ago. The fundraising team had been told that RE would not adequately track what they needed for fundraising and there was a huge hands off policy. The gift entry person was the database administrator and he reported to the accounting team and not the fundraising team. There was a huge disconnect between the fundraising activities and how things were tracked in RE. Just about everyone was afraid to even touch the database. RENXT had been implemented about 6 months prior to my arrival and the data entry/database person was absolutely against NXT. There was only one real champion for RE but she was also the youngest and most tech driven on the team.

However, the best thing for our fundraising team was RE NXT. Very few of our fundraisers had any database experience or training and database view (RE 7) scared them even though it had been in place for years. I started with some simple training and asked our fundraisers to learn how to do things in NXT. If they could work in NXT, then anything that had to be done in database view would be done by our database team. I have worked with each fundraiser one-on-one and had some group trainings and they are ongoing. I decided what absolutely needed to be done by fundraisers (constituent management) and have focused on making that as easy as possible.

It has been slow but everyone is now fairly proficient in managing constituents. They also add in actions and track opportunities (proposals) and more of them are becoming comfortable in using and building lists. Our event manager is proficient in the event module in both RE7 and NXT. However, since our leadership has instituted metrics based on what is in the database, our usage has gone way up. While we are not quite yet metric driven, everyone knows that it is coming next fiscal year and they are all working to make sure they understand how to keep everything updated. It really takes a lot of time and patience as well as the trust of the fundraisers. Hang in there!

Aubrie Wright

Hi Stacey,


Our Database Coordinator is our main cheerleader. She consistently sends out webinars from BB on updates we need to be aware of. She sends us emails about the newest feature of something that she would like us all to dig into. And if we have any questions, any time we call her. We did host a few training sessions in the beginning to get everyone on the same page, but then everyone ran pretty independently. NXT has been a game changer though for sure. It's way easier for our team young and old to learn and use on the go. Hope that helps some.

Jeannie Goings

Hello, Stacey Addison‍.


We identified champions and asked them to take a prescribed list of BBU trainings. Most of our champions are in a support role, but not all. The BBU trainings are helpful because when you bring your team together for an in-house training that also teaches your PNP, you're not starting at zero. Our in-house trainings are role based; we train support staff before we train fundraisers. We host open office hours where team members bring their questions and we demo an answer. Office hours are not role based. Anybody can attend and stay as long or as little as they want. The team members who stay for the entire office hour are the ones who are most interested in learning. They are the true champions. Good luck.

Matt Connell

Back in my data admin days I identified champions AND villains. I used my champions to showcase cool stuff and good ideas in practice and used the mistakes to point out what not to do and identify trends of carelessness.

I don't know if "regular" would be the right word to describe the trainings - "timely" seems more appropriate.