New report outlines 2020 CRM trends in the charity sector

In the commercial world, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and focuses on customer retention and sales growth. In the charity sector, this becomes Constituent Relationship Management. Along with this new title, charity CRM arguably has a broader remit – covering everything from managing your fundraising campaigns, marketing engagement with your donors, volunteer management, measuring the impact of your programs and reporting on the performance of all of the above. All this information can give charities a 360 view of their organisation and the supporters and beneficiaries associated with it.

And yet, according to this 2019 survey, just 55% of medium-size charities have a CRM system in place. That figure drops to 31% when it comes to small charities; dropping even further to 11% when it comes to micro charities.

So what are the biggest barriers to smaller charities implementing CRM systems? Is it simply the result of a lack of awareness that they can do more? Or is it a concern about the time, resources and effort needed to train staff? And why are the smallest charities so much less likely to have a CRM system in place?

To answer these questions, we’ve partnered with Salesforce.org to produce a new report that shows how other charities are using CRM and allows other organisation to benchmark their technology strategies with peers in 2020.