Has anyone used a consultant to help assess value of current systems against others in the market?

Alayna Hamilton

My organization is interested in hiring an unbiased 3rd-party consultant to help us determine if we might be better served by systems other than our current ones (which includes RE NXT) or by keeping the systems we have and refining how we use them (e.g., by reconfiguring our data structure and investing in better syncing). Have any of you have worked with a consultant that you'd recommend? Even if you've worked with one that you wouldn't recommend, do you have any tips for an organization who will be undergoing a systems assessment?

Dariel Dixon

@Alayna Hamilton I wish more organizations did things like this. I don't have any recommendations myself, however I can only hope that the folks receiving this information have an open mind to what maybe brought back to them. Also, are there certain limitations that your organization may have. There's something to be said about changing your processes, but it may lead to some growing pains.

Karen Diener

@Alayna Hamilton this is a service my organization, W4Sight provides. Send me a pm if you're interested in hearing more!

Karen

Alex Wong

@Alayna Hamilton
our org went through this ~2-3 years ago, and we went from RE 3rd party hosted to RE NXT.

First real question the consultant going to ask is “what is current process and pain point?" You can do the pain point within yourselves pretty easily. you can also look at your current process (however, the problem is going to be with “time” and resource). Org is very willing to spend money to hire a consultant to do something their own team “can” do, but can't due to resource/time limitation.

when 3rd party hosted, we were given access to the underlying database so I was able to create a bunch of reports that are natively difficult or impossible to do. This is the biggest requirement to overcome when looking into new system. Biggest thing with RE NXT is limited need to retrain every staff, and while SKY API isn't perfectly able to give me all the data point, it provided enough for me to work with to create any custom report or functionality. Our migration from RE to RE NXT was "relatively pain free” but still took 6 months to prepare. Migration to a totally new platform will require a lot more training + re-look at all existing integration with other system/platform + mapping what data goes where in the new platform, generally I have heard that it will take 2-3 years from prepare to finally migrated.

All to be considered. Hope this helps.

Stu Manewith

@Alayna Hamilton I'd recommend speaking with Peter Gross at nptechnologist.com. He's got broad, deep experience in the world of assessing and evaluating nonprofit tech systems.

Carolyn Copp

@Alayna Hamilton I am a 3rd party consultant and work with clients who use a number of databases, including RENXT. I do this type of work regularly and would be happy to help. I also am a former BB RENXT consultant…so I have a lot of experience working with RENXT clients.

Feel free to check out my website at www.donordevelopmentmatters.com. You can set up a free, no obligation call with me from the website.

James Cowen

@Alayna Hamilton

A while back one of our clients was moving from another platform and eventually selected NXT. A key issue for them was being able to get data from 3rd party applications into the CRM. Most consultants they found came from one of the CRM's initially and therefore tended to be biased towards or away from that CRM.

The reason we were asked is we did not come from the CRM side but send data into each CRM and therefore were less biased.

Sheila Wortham

@Alayna Hamilton

My organization was also looking to hire a 3rd-party consultant for a new CRM but we nixed the idea. Our team came up with a plan to get started that helped us eliminate a few vendors right away. We conducted an assessment and survey for key department heads.

I would suggest that before contacting a consultant, you may wish to have staff explain the pain points, come up with key elements that must be present when exploring a different platform, and create questions and a roadmap that works for your organization. It is time-consuming; so far, we have invested over 25 hours and counting.

I hope that helps! Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.