Determining your needs

Depending on your process—Agile, or more traditional—you will determine your needs in a less or more formal way. Whatever your process, some approaches are always appropriate.

First of all, it's useful to review the functionality, data structures, and data in your existing systems. Functionality is the easiest to discuss. Define the data fields and collection forms in your current system—custom data and profiles in CiviCRM's terminology—that may be needed in the new system. As you analyze existing systems, don't be limited to your primary contact database alone. For example, if you use paper sign-up sheets at events or have other paper, e-mail, or web-based data collection forms that are not part of your primary system, be sure to include them in the discovery analysis. If you use third-party web-based tools for broadcast emails or advocacy-related engagement, consider how those datasets will by migrated into or integrate with your CiviCRM data. Begin listing, in detail, your data structures and start mapping out how you will migrate data from the existing system(s) to the new system. As part of this process, identify the custom fields you will need to create and configure in the new system, and determine those that are no longer needed and can be ignored. Enduring information such as constituent interests is worth keeping, while transient information such as their food preferences at an event is less useful. Depending on how much data you have, and how clean it is, you may decide to lose some data during migration for the sake of starting with a cleaner system. But if you begin to lean in that direction, take the time to thoroughly consider if the data you are planning on leaving truly is not needed.

As difficult as data migration can be, it's much easier to invest the time up front to migrate everything you need than be in the position of trying to reimport data months down the road.

But, with that caution in mind, don't swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Resist the urge to just dump everything into the new system thinking that it will be sorted out later. Clutter appears on every system over time, bogging down the system, its interface and its users. Now is the time to pare back unnecessary complications, making the system easier to use and easier to train people to use. It will also help to reduce the scope of the data migration effort, which is often a costly part of a CRM initiative.

Looking at the data will often provide a sense of the scope required in the cleanup effort. You'll need to do some cleanup just to get the data into the new system (for example, dates have to all be in the same format and addresses need to be formatted consistently), and removing garbage in your system while you're at it is usually a good idea. You'll find when you are looking at the data and deciding how to clean it up that it can be useful to have some standards in place. For example, examine how addresses are entered, whether honorifics like Ms. or Mrs. are used, and standardize values in some freeform fields so the data can be more easily retrieved and entered from a select drop-down field.

Interviewing users at the data entry, operational reporting, and executive levels gives a useful and diverse insight into the most important data and process needs. You'll benefit from knowing the strategy in the executive director's head, the important and unnecessary elements in reports, and the workarounds regarding system use and data entry currently employed by front-line staff. When people experienced with CiviCRM do these interviews, there can also be good trade-offs negotiated, such as balancing what is easy or hard to implement against its relative importance to users. And remember that you can use fairly simple spreadsheet functions to transform unstructured data into something the CiviCRM import process can use or a developer can work with.

Using the existing system as a reference helps to ground solicitation of other needs. It is a good idea to ask users about the important new things the new system should do, what they would like to see included in the new system, and what is really problematic and irritating about the old system. Some nice-to-have features can be included with little effort in CiviCRM. Identifying pain points in using the current system provides valuable information on how the new system will be evaluated.

To get organizational buy-in for the CRM initiative, and create project momentum, plan to provide short-term deliverables. This could include wire frames (a visual representation of a website). There are a lot of helpful tools online that do wire frames (such as pain points are all fertile quick-win areas where you can demonstrate a commitment to improving user experience.

Asking everyone for feedback on possible implementation timelines is also useful, though be cautious about inadvertently making implied time-based commitments without first gaining a complete picture of the project scope. Reporting deadlines to funders, having functionality in place for certain events, and knowing crunch periods when it would be problematic to run old and new systems in parallel should all be reflected in your plans.