THE CRM UNDERNEATH
The development director walks into the board meeting with a question that has been keeping her up. The capital campaign is six months out. The trustees want to see the pipeline, the giving history, the touch counts, the soft credit picture. She has all of that data somewhere. Two CRMs, three spreadsheets, a Mailchimp export, and a pile of handwritten notes from the gala. She has been in the seat for eleven months. She is the fourth person in this role in five years. The system did not break this week. It has been broken for a while. This week is just when the cost showed up in the room.
This is what underutilization looks like at the inflection point. The 2026 Center for Effective Philanthropy State of Nonprofits report finds that 36 percent of organizations now report difficulty putting their data to work for decision-making, more than double the prior year, and 33 percent name CRM and data management as a primary operational problem. Sector research finds that only 16 percent of nonprofits say their fundraising staff is completely knowledgeable about the database the organization is paying for. Forty-eight percent of nonprofits are considering switching CRMs in the next twelve months, up from ten percent the year before. The tool is in place. The work the tool was bought to do is not happening.
For a nonprofit, the CRM problem rarely surfaces as a software problem. It surfaces as a fundraising problem at the worst possible moment. The board asks for a gift range chart and no one can produce one. The new CDO inherits a database that no one documented. The annual fund report from the prior development director cannot be reproduced because the report was a saved view that left when she did. For the consultant working alongside that nonprofit, the same problem shows up from a different angle. The strategic plan calls for a campaign feasibility study. The operating model recommends a new gift officer. The consultant cannot deliver any of it because the data underneath is not trustworthy. The work above the database depends on work that was never done inside the database.
What Vivia Studios builds inside CRM Set Up and Optimization is the underneath: the discipline that makes the tool earn its line item. A documented data dictionary so the next person in the seat does not start from zero. A constituent record that captures the relationship, not just the transaction. A pipeline view that the development director, the executive director, and the board chair can each read without translation. Custom field rules that prevent the slow accretion of fields no one uses. Bloomerang’s implementation research finds that 40 percent of configured CRM workflows are abandoned because frontline staff were not in the room when they were built. We put them in the room. We also build a quarterly hygiene rhythm so the database does not have to be rebuilt every time a new leader arrives. For consultants layering systems work into a client engagement, the same underneath, so the strategy work you are selling has something solid to land on.
The case for support is doing more than its share of the work right now because the database underneath it cannot carry its share. If that is the room you are in, the next move is a thirty-minute conversation about what is actually broken, what is salvageable, and what comes first.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
SOURCES