The Practicalities of AI

Deniz Hassan

11th December

Over the summer I embarked on a mini European speaking tour on how frontline fundraisers can use AI right now to make their jobs more effective. I'm lucky enough to look across the full fundraising ecosystem - from strategy to tech to tactics - and I've found uses across the lot. To put it into context, I’m a digital fundraising expert who uses AI frequently and having spent a lot of time thinking and testing, here are a bunch of things I've learned using it:

• It's a baby. A very clever baby but at the start of its useful life nonetheless. It gets stuff right but also gets a lot of other stuff wrong. So we can't just expect perfect outcomes.

• It tends to get stuff very wrong because we haven't fed it correctly. In much the same way as people, you get out what you put in. If we're poor with how we communicate with it, the margin for error is pretty big. We make basic assumptions with a lot of the stuff we do - and with AI, this can lead to the weird and the wonderful (/bloody awful).

• Both us and the AI need to learn together so we're not always starting from scratch. If, while you're working on something you make a mistake and clock that there's a better way to work, note it down for next time. Don't expect it to remember what you did and nail the same task in the same way each time. On a number of occasions, I worked with Chat GPT to undertake repetitive tasks and I found I could get the same outcome 9 out of 10 times and then the 10th would be massively different. So now I'm microscopically specific each time and repeat myself.

• I’ve used it extensively for heavy data analysis and found that I need to work in a lot of quality assurance. One of the tactics I've developed is asking it for granular steps so I can compare against my own workings. Only once I've done enough spot checks do I trust it to do an entire job. People asked 'what's the point if you still have to work hard?' to which I respond that, even if in the first instance it only saves me 5% of time, then I know that next time it will be more because I've learned how to drive it better. And of course, 5% is still 5%.

• It's an excellent troubleshooter. I use a number of enterprise level platforms to build anything from data visualisations, CRM configurations and automations. Often, it won't take the job off my hands but it will be able to look at my work and help me get round obstacles I might otherwise get stuck on.

• It's not a fundraiser but it can be taught fundraising (scarily better than many fundraisers I've met!). It doesn't get big strategic things like how you could create a diverse, balanced portfolio 'out of the box'. But I found that, given the right level of love, it will help with strategic planning and modelling.

These are just a few thoughts and I’d love to hear what you think. And of course, if anyone wants to discuss how we can help you leverage AI in your fundraising programmes, give me a shout. You can contact me at deniz@aawpartnership.com.

Benchmarking Smenchmarking

29th August by Deniz Hassan

Lately I've been awash with data from organisations big and small - all of whom want to know how they're doing. Inevitably the conversation of benchmarking comes up, especially around the time when we see the results of one of the larger digital studies released. 

As a sector we've got loads to compare ourselves to - from the IFL's Indigo study which focuses on 'Global Individual Giving', to the M+R Digital Benchmarks and the grandiosely entitled Wood for Tree 'State of the Sector' (not to be confused with the very similarly named Blackbaud 'Status of UK Fundraising') ...and we mustn't forget the countless internal benchmarks which organisations pay lots of money to conduct. 

But it's a conversation (and often a budget line) that I really try to steer people gently away from relying upon - whether it's digital benchmarking or fundraising benchmarking in general - and I'll explain why. 

How useful are they?

They're a bit useful but not massively so. In none of the benchmark studies we've got is there any sort of context attached. It's just numbers with subjective meaning…and in my slightly humble opinion, subjective meaning means no meaning. If you see what I mean.

Let me give you an example of one of the more simple things people like to benchmark against - email click through rate. Many a conversation about email strategy starts with "what's a good click through rate?" and "the benchmarks shows that xx% is good".

This is not a great start to the conversation as it immediately assumes that all organisations are the same. For instance in one large study, within the international aid section, you have the British Red Cross participating alongside Women for Women International UK. Is there really a useful comparison to be made between your data and a merged dataset of including such diverse organisations?

And perhaps my organisation is really focussed on creating a large pool of low value donors (with a high conversion rate) vs another which is concentrated on higher value? If I don't know the separate strategies of all the participants then something like 'average cash gift' is not helpful to compare against.

The wrong metrics

Studies often use quite baffling metrics that we would never use when creating our own strategies. For example, how many strategies have a KPI for "Investment in digital advertising divided by total online revenue" (ignoring the subjectivity of 'total online revenue')?

My favourite red herring is the 'cost per donation'. It's meaningless and only exists because (as I'll go into later) many participants can't actually measure their activity well enough to understand the differences between the investment and returns across acquisition and retention. Again, is there anything meaningful in comparing my cost per donation as, say, a small membership organisation in a moment of growth vs a mature organisation with a much higher base of existing donors? CPD is not the same as CPA.

Similarly the return on ad spend (ROAS) is to be taken with large fistfuls of salt. Having seen multiple submissions, I can tell you that the word 'return' can mean a plethora of things. Is it the immediate return at point of acquisition? Is it a long term modelled return? How have participants attributed spend and income across the channels? What assumptions does it take vs the amount of real data in there? So many variables across so many organisations means it's not going to be reliable to compare against.

Data quality

One of the biggest issues facing our sector is data quality and measurement - this affects organisations big and small. I've had the privilege of working with a number of top 20 charities this year and they all have measurement issues. For example, one internal benchmarking study had a number of different definitions for how income was measured. That really should be a simple one so you get my point.

Similarly phrases such as 'Not all participants were able to provide data for every metric' does not fill me with confidence or joy. It might be roughly translated as 'we asked a bunch of organisations some questions and we might have got some answers which may or may not be useful or accurate. But here's some graphs'.

The best benchmarking study - WHICH I LOVED (yes, I can be upbeat you see) - that I've seen, collected data consistently across all markets and all channels with no variance and stored it in one data warehouse running a consistent data model. ROAS is the same for every market and channel. As is CPA. As is the attribution. Super.

In many studies, participants are invited to submit their own data which is a huge problem. Take the example of attribution - one organisation may use last click attribution to fill out the form and another might use campaign level income allocation as determined by their custom CRM rules. It's the old apples and pears adage. Take paid search - this will always show a better return on last click attribution than Meta.

Using tools such as Google Analytics can also pose problems. In GA4, for example, you can set your own custom attribution settings. And that's before you even consider that GA will always favour (by Google's own admission) Google channels. So income from one organisation might be attributed to email for one organisation and paid channels for another.

The other big assumption these studies make is that people are skilled in extracting, transforming and cleaning their data. It's a big old job and different people will put different levels of rigour into it…it's just another variable. Self submission without any consistent rules or auditing isn’t a reliable way of collecting data. And even if there were consistent rules, it would be impossible for most participants to follow them.

So what's the future?

I do think benchmarking can work though. But I think the sector needs to mature significantly around data. Data literacy is still much lower than it should be considering the amounts of money some organisations are investing in paid media channels. We're still getting our heads around what attribution really means and we still see huge differences in things like our fundraising systems vs management accounts. This is what we need to work on.

But for the time being I think a lot of it is simply navel gazing. My CTR's biggest than your CTR and all that…

ChatGPT and Fundraising – What do You Need to Know? (Part One)

13th March 2023 by SOFII

With so much talk about ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), it can be hard to understand what this new technology could mean for us – as individuals and as fundraisers. We are delighted here to share a great new interview by the fantastic SOFII (Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration) featuring three experienced fundraisers – Emily Casson (Digital Marketing and Fundraising Manager at The Salvation Army), Matt Smith (Director of Transformation & Innovation at THINK Consulting Solutions) and our very own Digital Director Deniz Hassan. Below, SOFII asks them five questions about ChatGPT and how it could impact fundraising now and in the future.

Q1: Have you experimented with ChatGPT? If so, can you please tell us what you learned?

Emily Casson (EC): I’ve been experimenting lately (both in a personal and professional capacity) asking ChatGPT everything from how to brighten up my balcony garden in winter, to asking it to draft a fundraising strategy. I liken it to having an eager intern, great for research tasks, answering questions faster than Google and basic copywriting but it needs a steer in the right direction. 

ChatGPT sometimes presents opinion as fact without citing sources, so you do need to fact check – but it is possible to debate it and it even apologises when you question it. For example, I had a lively discussion with ChatGPT on what constitutes a ‘small’ charity.  

Deniz Hassan (DH): I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT since launch, across a number of areas including creative and campaign analysis. I think, like anything, it’s a case of you get out what you put in. The richer the information you feed in, the higher the quality. 

Matt Smith (MS): I’ve used it for both with writing supporter-facing communications for charity clients and to help with new product development. I’ve learned that the more time you spend on writing the brief (as with working with human writers!) the better the output. 

It’s incredibly impressive and I’ve found it particularly helpful with the start of a project or getting going on a first draft of a piece of work – it can help remove the anxiety of having a blank page and give you a great skeleton to then add your own thinking and creative flourish.

Q2: What do you think are the most exciting applications of ChatGPT for fundraisers and the charity sector?

MS: It will mean we can get much more done in any given day. By using AI (artificial intelligence) tools wisely, we’ll be able to be much more efficient, perhaps even get double the amount of work done, but whilst providing us the chance to spend more time on the truly human and creative parts of our roles. And by writing great initial briefs, we’ll then be able to use ChatGPT to create first drafts that give us back more time and creative energy to use on perfecting multiple pieces of work – all in the same time it would usually take to write one. 

It will also help with idea generation and can be used a great starting point for ideation sessions.

DH: It will certainly help rapid prototyping. In this digitally driven age, volume of creative executions is key. ChatGPT can really be an extra resource in creating variations that can be tested, combining top performing ads and identifying trends. 

EC: I actually asked ChatGPT this exact question and within seconds it gave a few useful examples – such as writing web copy, developing fundraising strategies, template emails and event plans.  

I think it has the potential to be a substantial change for society, similar to how search engines changed the way we find out information. For the charity sector it could mean we can get a starter for ten on a range of strategies, plans, campaigns, research and copy, that a human can then edit, saving us precious time. 

It is great for idea generation and research, as well as copywriting, so I see it as being beneficial to small charities who don’t have a lot of resources.

Q3: Can you see any risks/potential negative applications/ethical issues surrounding ChatGPT that fundraisers should have on their radars?

DH: Ubiquity has long since been an issue in fundraising and the danger is Chat GPT makes this worse. It exists by learning from what’s inputted so naturally if we keep putting the same stuff in and asking similar questions, it will output similar stuff. 

Ethically the issues are the same as without it. Stories need to be authentic and maintain dignity. We can’t use it to churn out disingenuous creative just as we can't write stuff like that ourselves. 

MS: One issue is ensuring that unconscious bias and unethical content is recognised, and that work is done to remove these. As with any technology that is based on a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT can and will generate offensive or biased content because it pulls from things like Wikipedia articles and web pages that themselves contain these biases. 

Another issue is that we become over-reliant on it in situations that require a human touch, or that we sleepwalk into replacing roles and tasks without fully understanding the consequences. It’s an incredible powerful and exciting tool, but this power comes with real risk.

EC: I think that there are a few risks associated and it is key to have human oversight. It presents thoughts as fact but is only as good as how it has been programmed, so I have concerns around amplifying bias. 

It also doesn’t currently cite sources, so it is hard to know where it has gained information from – and as we all know, what is on the internet isn’t always truth.  

ChatGPT can learn tone of voice, but I would hate us to lose what makes specific charities unique by a copy and paste approach, so I would use it as a starting point not the end product.

We also need to be aware of the fact our donors might use it. I asked it ‘what are the most effective charities to donate to?’ and it gave me a few options. So there is the question of how ChatGPT decides what charities to give prominence too, as donors may also use it to research charities.

I think one of the key ethical issues is around what AI can’t do. As much as we can programme them, it will never be able to replace human empathy and we have to be careful about how we use it and not lose the human touch where it is important.

Q4: Do you know anyone who is making good use of ChatGPT already?

MS: At THINK we’ve used ChatGPT to help us develop new products for our clients. It’s been incredibly helpful at that first development stage to provide structure and to save time during a particularly busy part of the year. Some of our charity clients are already using the tool to produce first drafts of press releases, copy for adverts and as an idea generation tool. 

So far, the examples I’ve seen have been appropriate time savers, rather than replacing whole tasks or functions (so far!). I liken it to using Google to answer a question, rather than thumbing through a hardcopy encyclopaedia for the answer. ChatGPT will help us be more efficient and get more done, but it won’t replace the need for human originality, scrutiny and nuance.

EC: An American mental health non-profit Koko has been doing some testing with ChatGPT and tried using a co-pilot approach with AI suggesting prompts to peer supporters. It will be interesting to see if other charities try this ‘co-pilot’ approach.  Someone also shared with me this list of prompts for marketing/comms that could be useful for charities to try. 

Q5: Any final thoughts for our community of fundraisers, who might be hearing a lot about ChatGPT right now?

EC: While ChatGPT is relatively new, it is a very fast-growing area (and often over-subscribed so potentially paid versions may be coming). Google will be launching its own version ‘Bard’ soon, so this technology will be a fundamental shift in our ways of working. It is important that as this technology grows, we as a sector debate the ethics and use cases. We should take advantage of the opportunities it offers, while keeping to our values.

DH: Like any shiny new tool, have fun with it learn what it can do. But whatever you do, just ensure you’re doing it with strategy in mind. Do things for reasons that help you achieve your goals. Use it if it fits, don’t worry if it doesn’t! 

Thanks to SOFII for allowing us to republish this article. Please note, the answers above have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

AAW Focus on Fundraising in 2023 - 5 Tips to Help You Appoint That Role

Last week Imogen Ward explored some key opportunities for 2023, including those around the recruitment of leadership positions at NFPs.  Ali Kurn, AAW Group’s Managing Consultant of Executive Search, picks up the baton and reflects on how organisations can improve their chances of placing key roles in a competitive market by adopting a more focused, human and proactive approach to recruitment.

Continuing on a key message from my colleague Imogen last week, charities really cannot afford to be complacent when carrying out recruitment campaigns this year.

As you probably already know, there is a LOT of competition around for leadership roles, particularly in fundraising. With the longer-term impacts of the pandemic and reduced government funding, charities are under so much pressure now from their Boards to meet bold fundraising targets, create a step-change in income growth and diversify funding. There simply aren’t enough people around with the experience and the confidence to deliver on big ambitions.

So, when you are competing for candidates this year, what should you take into account?

Tip 1. Prioritise the Process. Investing time and preparation in the design of your recruitment campaigns right from the start is crucial. Part of that process is giving yourself time to work out what you really want and need in a role, and positively selling the opportunity whilst also being realistic, open and honest about the opportunities and challenges. Rather than simply replacing like with like, a crucial part of our recruitment process at AAW is to use our charity sector experience and expertise to work with our clients to consult and advise them on what they really need in a position to enhance their success. Sometimes appointing an Interim in post can buy you the breathing space to prepare fully for a transitional permanent appointment.

Tip 2. The Package. Something else you need to agree on before you start, and be crystal clear about in your communications, are your salary parameters, expectations around location and flexibility, and the number of days you want someone to be in the office. Salary is now becoming less of a ‘hygiene factor’ and a significant uplift in pay has risen further up the key criteria for candidates in their job searches. We’ve heard of an increasing number of placements at offer stage going awry due to a lack of communication around these issues, particularly around working hours and office presence. So, just how hybrid is hybrid?

There’s a really interesting balance to be struck between what candidates want in terms of flexibility of hybrid working, and the needs of organisations and their teams. In this post-lockdown world we are seeing a real shift whereby more organisations are seeking Directors in the office much more frequently than in the last 2 years to help bring teams together and increase learning and development.

So, whilst the last few years have led to organisations welcoming a wider pool of talent for roles by enabling people to work remotely and potentially live much further away from the office, the reality of managing teams and ambitious targets may well be leading to a bit of conflict in the face of the rise in cost of living and travelling.

Tip 3. Be Organised. To compete in 2023’s recruitment market you need to set and communicate a recruitment timetable that allows the campaign to be robust but swift enough so that you don’t lose good candidates along the way. You should have interview panels identified, briefed and ready, with their diaries blocked out. You should know the decision makers in the process and ensure they have the authority to make decisions throughout, especially after the final interview. Candidates want decisive organisations that want them – make sure you communicate that!

Tip 4. Be Human: On the subject of communication – poor communication can easily lead to candidates taking opportunities elsewhere, or even dropping out of processes. Organisations that do well understand the time, effort and commitment that candidates put into a recruitment process and show that by providing timely and meaningful feedback – often in a one-to-one phone call. Mutual respect is so important, and many organisations could improve the way they communicate this to their candidates. That includes ensuring that your assessment process reflects the key skills and knowledge you’re trying to ascertain. For example, a presentation should be beneficial for both candidate and organisation, enabling a deeper insight and understanding from both sides. 

Tip 5. Go Deeper: We’ve also noticed an increase in the depth of conversations that candidates want about an opportunity and organisation before they decide whether to apply. We spend a great deal of time talking with our candidates, sharing key information from our in-depth briefings with clients on the role, finances, etc and cultivating enthusiasm and excitement. Putting that time and effort in really secures a candidate’s interest throughout the whole process and sets the role apart from others they may be contemplating. 

Over the past few months my team and I have successfully placed C-Suite and Leadership roles in organisations such as Oxfam, Barnardo’s, St John Ambulance, Marie Curie, UK Youth and RNID. We have also worked with Higher Education establishments (in the UK and globally), Hospices, Air Ambulance Charities and NHS trusts.

If you need any assistance with designing and conducting a personal, bespoke and effective recruitment process, please contact me at ali@aawpartnership.com I’d be delighted to have a chat about how we can work together in 2023.

Leadership Spotlight On… Linda McBain, Chief Digital Officer of Save the Children UK

15th November by Jo Hastie

On Wednesday 7th December, AAW will be hosting a special event in London focused around the cultural and organisational changes NGOs need to make to embrace the full potential of digital.

One of our key speakers at this event will be Linda McBain, Save the Children’s Chief Digital Officer. We caught up with Linda to get a sneak preview of some of the things she will be helping us explore when we get together in December…

Tell us about your journey in digital.

Before moving to the charity sector in 2007, I worked agency side and became their de-facto technology person because no one else could understand computers. I then got my first ‘digital’ roles in the charity sector at CAFOD and British Red Cross before moving to Save the Children in 2011.

What does a Chief Digital Officer do?

I sit at the intersection between the wider business as a whole and technology, thinking about the role of digital and data and how we really utilise it to deliver more impact for children whether that’s improving our finance systems, fundraising and marketing or our wider relationship with the global movement. It’s less about the ‘tech bit’ and more about people, our culture and ways of working.

What advice would you give your 25-year-old self?

I have always held on to the thinking behind the saying ‘comparison is the thief of joy’. It is really important for you to create your own path and think about what is going to make you happy and what you want from life. I am happiest and do my best work when I am able to be my authentic self.

How would you respond to Deniz’s blog on the failure of the third sector’s approach to digital?

I am quite optimistic compared to Deniz’s pessimism, so between us we are a good balance!

I don’t think this is simply a charity sector issue. I see many similar issues across sectors from old companies who have a lot of legacy ways of working and technologies. If you weren’t set up as digital by default, then shifting your business model can be tough.

Deniz is right in saying that change isn’t happening fast enough but the reasons behind that are not purely digital ones.

Charity governance is often overly concerned with risk and risk management which holds people back in this area. We see this most obviously in the way organisations plan and budget -  most charities just roll targets over year on year which doesn’t allow for significant changes. We need to be thinking about longer term growth, testing new channels and developing new necessary skills.

I believe there is a risk that the sector is being left open to the potential of more disruption from players who might come in with a digital-first model.

Where do you think Save the Children has made progress?

I don’t think we have everything right yet at Save the Children, but we are thinking across the whole organisation about how we coach staff to prioritise data as that first step to adopting an insight approach to drive growth.  Data is very powerful, but as a sector I wonder if we are utilising it as much as we could to make smart decisions.

We have also adopted more agile principles in the way we work  - focusing on putting the user first, and working collaboratively towards common goals, bringing the right skills together to deliver.

We have invested in our technology, built-up teams and developed skills – but digital is always evolving and changing so it can be difficult to stay up to date.. It’s about carving time and budgets out for a continuous learning and development approach.

What do non-digital leaders need to do now to help their organisations become more digitally enabled across fundraising, service delivery, engagement and social change.

Recognise that they don’t have all the answers, but they don’t need to either. Engage with experts and staff across the organisation who are doing the work every day. Leaders need to become the agents for empowerment and focus on removing barriers for staff to provide the right environment so they can do their best work.

Linda McBain, Simon Waldman and Deniz Hassan will both be speaking at AAW’s free event on 6th December in Moorgate, London focusing on the cultural shift that organisations should be considering to enable digital transformation.

We are now close to capacity so if you would like to join us or know more about the event, contact jane@aawpartnership.com.

Digital - the whole truth

14th September 2021 by Deniz Hassan

It’s time us fundraisers were honest with ourselves – we’ve really dropped the ball on digital.

And what’s worse is that we don’t even know how bad it is.

Here’s a fun little example just to illustrate. TPX Impact recently conducted a survey about digital transformation where a whopping 53% of organisations reckoned they’d class themselves as ‘digitally mature’; only 11% thought they were ‘immature’. At the same time nearly 60% ‘feel they feel they do not have the tools, resources and capacity to achieve their goals’. So we’ve basically got nearly 90% of organisations (that took the survey, I know) who essentially think they’re doing a half decent job but at the same time don’t feel they have the right tools to do a decent job.

When I say ‘behind’ I don’t mean that the actual state of digital in the sector is worse than it has been. Far from it. Organisations are doing more than ever. We’re doing ok tactically for sure (masked a lot by exceptional 2020 results which were obviously much higher across the board). But what I’m saying is that that we’ve moved far too slow and while digital has advanced massively on the whole, charities haven’t. They’re still doing the bare minimum. And the time is getting close to where we’ll stop being able to get away with it.

The holes are everywhere. From our understanding of technologies to how we plan and measure; from skills gaps at both leadership to a lack of talent coming through at operational level; from creating organisational structures that enable digital growth to embracing organisational cultures that allow it to thrive. A bit like the UK under the Tories… everything seems to be in decay.

Let’s start with technology… it’s getting dangerously away from us. While other, more forward thinking sectors are developing technology that brings value across the customer lifecycle, we’re still talking about CRM. We’re still stuck using archaic, monolithic platforms. And our version of a technological silver bullet is to just put a more modern version in. We’re thinking in outdated paradigms and we’re relying on the people selling us products to do the thinking for us. As a result we’re left with siloed data which we can’t accurately report on or segment (to name just two things).

Now let’s come to team structures and cultures, which goes hand in hand with the well-publicised digital skills shortage in the sector. First of all, yes there is a skills shortage. But why? We always assume it’s because ‘all the digital experts out there want to work for the big tech companies for more money’. Well that might be one reason but the elephant in the room is that, as a sector, we simply are not offering the correct cultures and structures that would entice people with these skills into our organisations. Let me ask you, as a budding data scientist, would you rather work in an organisation where you’re surrounded and supported by peers and more experienced leaders all working to achieve the same goals vs being ‘the data guy’ in a charity where nobody really knows what you do, nobody is there to advance your knowledge and you never really get to see the impact of your work?

Which takes me onto leadership. The people that make it all happen. Frankly a group of people who need much more support than is on offer. Support to understand a completely new set of rules; support to understand how to make the right decisions; support to know it’s ok not to know; support to know that it’s ok to try something and fail miserably in the knowledge that you at least did something. Because without this support our tendency is to avoid risk; we trust the wrong people and we make decisions that are short-term.

And because of this, there’s a big old vacuum to fill which is often done by agencies. We see it time and time again… we send out that RFP which we think is going to solve all of our problems. The RFP that says ‘Digital Agency Wanted! Must be able to do absolutely everything with next to no support from us’. And the agencies come knocking. They come armed with creative and spreadsheets alongside big old costs. And they say, ‘we can build you a digital strategy!’ and ‘it’s ok, we’ll do all the measurement for you!’. And then say ‘it’s not working because your content isn’t good enough’ and ‘your website experience isn’t good enough’ and ‘but our figures show it’s all going great’ and (my fave) ‘IT’S IOS 14’S FAULT!!!!’.

And then, after 2 years and £megabucks we say the relationship wasn’t working and we publish the same brief again without even considering what the underlying issues were (see above).

And all of this is why the answer to our digital woes is often to bang in a new CRM, recruit a mid-level manager and sling money at an agency. And why we will continue to fail until we can fail no more.

The CRM Dilemma

20th June 2021 by Tobin Aldrich

Yes folks we are deep into the age of the big CRM switch. Here our Principal Partner (and database guru) Tobin Aldrich offers a few words of advice (and warning) if you have the task of leading a big switcheroo in 2022.

One of the real joys of being a strategic consultant is the variety of clients you work with. In the past year or so, we've worked with organisations from across the UK and Ireland and countries as varied as the US, Bangladesh, Egypt and Uruguay. We've worked with non-profits of pretty much every description and cause area from local and regional charities to massive UN organisations. The projects we've done have been incredibly varied, including market entry studies, auditing and reviewing fundraising and marketing functions, developing major appeals and campaigns, creating change strategies and supporting restructures as well as lots of recruiting.

Despite this diversity, there are some common themes in all of our projects and clients. Fundraising only works when it is fully embedded in everything that a non-profit does. Everything in the end comes back to strategy and people, and one can't work without the other.

Another common thread is that everyone understands they need to make their organisations digitally enabled and data driven but hardly anyone has the systems they need to make this happen.

At the moment it feels like every one of our clients either is in the middle of or about to embark upon replacing their CRM database. These are very significant projects involving major investment and which take up very large amounts of organisational time and attention.

As may have been mentioned, I've been around for a bit. But I did have a life before fundraising and a big chunk of that was spent in the IT sector. I've been involved in major business systems projects since the days when the computer was a big box the size of a room with less memory than today's pocket calculators. I've spent quite a lot of time specifying and implementing CRM systems and while the technology has moved on, the basics of successful systems implementation are exactly the same now as they were thirty years ago.

It's extremely frustrating to see CRM projects go wrong today for the same reasons as they have for decades.

There are I think, five key ways your new systems implementation doesn't give you the answer you wanted:

Unrealistic expectations. The tech industry has been over-hyping what it can deliver since the first Colossus was turned on at Bletchley Park and is still merrily selling blue sky solutions to this day. We are constantly told that the latest whizzy thing (marketing automation anyone?) will magically solve all previous problems. You know what? If you put the same crappy data into a system with the old structure that the intern came up with a decade ago, you get the same rubbish results in a shinier box.

Mission creep. Out of unrealistic expectations comes an overly ambitious project. It's a great idea to put all of your data into one database, right? So combine all information about everyone the organisation deals with into one place. Makes sense. The problem is that you have committed yourselves to replacing not only the fundraising system but the services database and potentially other business systems across the organisation. All with own processes and needs. Oh and systems able to handle all of these functions together are much more expensive. When actually you could have got the integration that is actually essential by taking feeds from all of these systems and putting them into a data warehouse. Someone needs to make a properly informed decision about what information is actually needed when, where and by whom before you buy a Rolls Royce when a Nissan Micra would have done.

Too much focus on the brand, not enough on the people. There's lots of focus on which system a charity should adopt. Salesforce, Dynamics, Raiser's Edge? Usually it doesn't matter all that much which particular system is selected as most popular CRMs do basically the same things in pretty similar ways. It is all about how the solution is specified and implemented. And crucially who by and how good they are.

Knowledge gaps. A fundamental problem is the gap between the people who know how the system works and those who understand the business processes. This is definitely an issue in fundraising where there is a combination of some quite quirky processes and activities, and a workforce that isn't particularly digitally literate. The lack of digital understanding often seems to increase in proportion to the seniority of the individual. There are not many people who both thoroughly understand how fundraising works at a granular level and who can transfer that into a proper specification and architecture for a business system. If someone like that is not at the heart of a new implementation (on the client side), you are in trouble.

Ownership. Senior ownership of the project is crucial. This is not just oversight of a project board, it is active engagement in making sure not only that the project has priority for time and resources but that it keeps to its scope and vision. Unless the new system is bringing significant improvements in business processes, the investment is being wasted. All the way through the project, there will be pushback against change and unless this is challenged, existing inefficiencies will be replicated in the new environment.

Planning and timescales

Just as the IT industry over-promises on the technology, it consistently underestimates how long it takes to implement systems properly. Or vendors promise to hit unrealistic deadlines to win contracts.

The reality is that everything will take longer than you think. And cost more. But the more time you spend upfront on the preparation, the more time and money overall you will save. Getting the specification right is both absolutely essential and really hard. There will always be the temptation to rush to the solution, but if key issues aren't identified and dealt with up front they will come back and bite. These are often nothing to do with the technology itself. How can you know what reports you want out of the system if the charity hasn't completely clarified what its key fundraising KPIs are, how they are defined and how they should be measured? And if your overall fundraising objectives aren't clearly set, how can you come up with these KPIs?

The key point is that technology doesn't solve organisational problems. Non-profits need to answer the important questions about why they need information, who needs it, in what form and when before they embark on major technology projects. Then the right skills and experience need to be brought together to come up with the most practical answer and that project has to be given real organisational support and priority.

Embarking on a new CRM project isn't something to be attempted lightly. But the pitfalls can be avoided with a combination of strategy, planning and resources. Oh and time, lots of time.

If any of the above sounds familiar or resonates, drop Tobin a line. We won’t be able to solve all your problems, but we can help you with the structure around planning, process and measurements. Tobin can be reached at tobin@aawpartnership.com.