A CRM can hold every donation, interaction and supporter detail you’ve ever collected. But can it actually help move a donor relationship forward?
At F&P Fundraising Forum 2026, Heartburst CEO Rob van der End challenged fundraisers to think differently about the systems sitting underneath their fundraising – not simply in terms of what their CRM can store, but what it enables them to do. Here’s what I took away from his session.
Your CRM is not a filing cabinet
Picture a donor journey.
Someone makes their first gift. They receive a thank you. A little later, they hear about the impact of their support. Then, at the right moment, they receive another opportunity to give. The journey has been mapped. Everyone has agreed it’s a good idea. Perhaps it has even been presented to the board.
But somewhere after the thank you, it stops.
Not because the fundraising strategy was wrong, but because the system underneath it couldn’t deliver what had been designed. Unfortunately, once that first gift has been secured, it is often the next part of the journey – the impact update, ongoing nurturing and second ask that help build the donor relationship – that falls away.
That led to the question at the heart of Rob’s session: Is your CRM helping you grow donors – or just storing them?
A CRM that simply stores information is essentially a filing cabinet. It holds the donor record and waits for someone to do something with it. Every next step depends on a person remembering that it needs to happen.
A CRM that supports donor journeys should behave more like a fundraiser. It recognises what a supporter has done, triggers the appropriate next step and helps move the relationship forward without every action having to be initiated by a human.
That distinction matters because the purpose of a CRM isn’t simply to keep accurate records of your donors. It should help enable the fundraising you are trying to do.
Four donor journeys your CRM should be able to deliver
So how can you tell whether your CRM is doing what you need it to do? Rob offered a practical starting point – look at the donor journeys you need it to support.
He identified four that he believes every fundraising organisation should be able to run:
First gift → second gift: recognise a first-time donor, welcome them appropriately and create a pathway towards another gift.
Engaged → next step: recognise signals of engagement – perhaps someone attends an event, downloads something or interacts with your communications – and respond with an appropriate next action.
One-off → recurring: identify when a supporter may be ready to deepen their commitment and invite them into Regular Giving at the right time.
Lapsed → reactivated: recognise different types of lapsed donors and respond accordingly, rather than treating someone who once gave $20 in the same way as someone who gave $20,000.
While these were Rob’s four core journeys, he also highlighted Major Giving stewardship as another important area where a CRM should support fundraisers to manage and deepen donor relationships.
The test isn’t whether your CRM contains the data required to do these things. Most do. It’s whether it can actually deliver the journeys without your team continually having to make them happen manually.
How much work is your CRM creating?
If you’re not sure how well your CRM is performing, another useful test is to look at what happens around it every day.
How many of these sound familiar?
- Your automations rely on fragile workarounds.
- Everyday changes require a consultant or developer.
- You export data to Excel for routine reporting.
- Core capability sits behind paid add-ons.
- Your website, email, finance system and CRM don’t talk to each other.
- Nobody is confident the donor data is right.
- Most of the team avoids using the CRM.
- You’re paying for capability you never use.
Rob’s rule of thumb was that two or three of these may indicate fixable problems. Five or more often points to something more fundamental.
Of these, a lack of confidence in the data can be particularly damaging. Once people stop trusting what is in the CRM, they start downloading information into spreadsheets and creating their own records. Suddenly, there is no longer one agreed source of truth.
But even if your organisation recognises itself in that list, Rob’s message was not “Go shopping for another CRM.” Quite the opposite.
Before you replace, ask whether you can optimise or integrate
There are three possible responses to a CRM that isn’t delivering what you need:
Optimise. The platform itself is capable, but configuration, processes or adoption are holding you back.
Integrate. The CRM works, but the systems surrounding it – perhaps your website, donation platform, email or finance system – aren’t properly connected.
Replace. The platform itself genuinely limits what the organisation needs to do and is unlikely to support its future growth.
Rob was explicit that replacement shouldn’t be the default. In fact, for many organisations, improving what they already have may produce more value at a fraction of the cost and disruption of a migration.
If optimisation is the answer, he suggested starting with five practical fixes:
- Rebuild frequently used reports inside the CRM rather than relying on exports
- Get your existing first-gift journey working
- Connect donation forms to donor records
- Establish and clean a single source of truth
- Allocate responsibility for donor journeys to a team member and give them the time they need to maintain them
That last one is easily overlooked. Automation isn’t something you build once and forget. “Unowned automation decays,” says Rob. Resourcing may be what you need, not new technology.
And if integration is the issue, map every system that touches donor or campaign data and identify every point at which someone manually copies, exports or re-enters information.
Then, Rob advised, “prioritise by pain, not by ease.”
Rather than starting with whichever integration is easiest to implement, look at where manual work, risk and poor-quality data are causing the greatest problems.
A CRM can be ‘free’ and still cost you dearly
A Prison Fellowship Australia case study illustrated why licence fees alone don’t tell the full story when it comes to the cost of implementing and running a CRM.
The organisation works across multiple regions with several hundred volunteers, alongside managing donations and bequests. While its CRM had a low licence cost, some workflows required developer support, information was also being managed across spreadsheets and staff were struggling to get the view of supporters they needed.
It’s a useful reminder that the licence fee is only one part of the cost of a CRM. Configuration, maintenance, integrations, ongoing development and the staff time required to work around limitations can all contribute to its true cost.
For Prison Fellowship Australia, then, the question wasn’t simply, “What does our CRM cost?” It was whether the organisation had a system that could support the way its team needed to work.
Heartburst first worked with Prison Fellowship Australia on its processes, personas, audiences and segmentation before a new platform was selected. The organisation ultimately moved to Virtuous, integrating the CRM with its website and Xero and bringing donor management, fundraising and volunteer engagement into a more connected system.
The shift was about more than software. The new CRM now serves the organisation, reminding the team of tasks that need to be done, rather than being something the team was continually fighting.
It’s a useful test of any fundraising technology: is your team serving the system, or is the system serving your team?
If you do need a new CRM, don’t start with a demo
It may be that, for your organisation, replacement really is the right answer. If so, Rob’s advice is clear: key CRM decisions should be made before the vendor demo.
The way many organisations choose technology is this – there’s a problem, someone Googles the options, a shortlist emerges, vendors demonstrate their products and the team gravitates towards the one they liked best.
Rob contrasted that instinct-led process with a more disciplined one:
The first three stages happen before approaching vendors.
First, understand the organisation’s goals and fundraising maturity. Then map its processes and the donor journeys it needs to deliver. From there, define the requirements and broader technology architecture. Only then should potential systems be evaluated and a recommendation made.
Why? Because a vendor demo and organisational discovery answer two completely different beasts.
A demo answers: Can the product do this?
Discovery asks: Is this what we actually need?
And only proper testing can answer: Can it do what we need, in the way our organisation needs to do it?
That testing may include giving vendors specific scenarios to work through – based on your donor journeys, workflows and requirements – and asking them to show how their platform would handle them. It shifts the process from watching what a vendor chooses to demonstrate to testing what matters specifically to your organisation.
Demos aren’t dishonest – they’re simply vendor-led. If you haven’t established your own requirements first, you’re assessing the CRM against the vendor’s script rather than your organisation’s needs.
Don’t put an old operating model into a shiny new CRM
A Baptist Mission Australia case study illustrates why discovery work matters. Its work with Heartburst didn’t initially begin as a CRM review at all. A move from Blackbaud Financial Edge to Xero prompted a broader examination of its supporter ecosystem.
That revealed supporter data fragmented across Raiser’s Edge, Mailchimp, DonorELF and spreadsheets; approximately one full-time equivalent of staff effort absorbed by reconciliation, data handling and spreadsheet-based forecasting; and fundraising campaigns constrained by limited segmentation and automation.
Rather than immediately comparing CRMs, Heartburst worked with 12 people across leadership, fundraising, communications, finance and field roles to understand how the organisation operated. They mapped workflows, identified hidden manual effort, examined the wider technology architecture and considered what level of technology the team could realistically adopt and sustain.
Only then came design. Because, “The most expensive mistake is replicating an outdated process inside a new system,” says Rob.
Changing technology creates an opportunity to ask which processes should continue, which need to change and which should simply disappear. Baptist Mission Australia designed its future operating model first – including its donor journeys, data, integrations and distinctive requirements – before deciding what technology should support it.
In other words, migration shouldn’t simply move your existing problems somewhere newer and shinier.
Make the requirements about outcomes, not features
Once you understand the future operating model, those needs can become specific requirements against which potential platforms are assessed.
For Baptist Mission Australia, those included donor and church relationships, pledges and recurring giving, campaign management and segmentation, Xero integration, secure access for field staff, automation and reporting – with each requirement connected to an outcome.
Xero integration wasn’t desirable simply because “integrates with Xero” looks good on a feature list. It mattered because the organisation wanted greater confidence in its financial information and less manual reconciliation.
Campaign management and segmentation mattered because it wanted more targeted appeals rather than blanket communications.
And requirements were weighted according to what the organisation could realistically use and sustain – not according to which platform could produce the longest list of impressive functionality.
That completely changes the conversation with a vendor. Instead of asking “Can your CRM manage first-time donors?” you can say: “Here is our first-gift process – show us how your system delivers it from start to finish.”
Instead of asking “Does it integrate with our finance system?” ask: “Show us where the data moves – and where manual work remains.”
The organisation is no longer watching a demo. It is directing the test.
CRM modernisation is an organisational decision
Rob’s case studies also showed that organisations can arrive at CRM change through very different doors.
Prison Fellowship Australia had a capable platform that didn’t fit the way the organisation needed to work. Baptist Mission Australia’s finance change exposed a much wider systems and donor-engagement issue. For Mukti Australia, a small organisation supporting work with women and children in India and Sri Lanka, the catalyst was different again – its long-standing database was approaching end of life.
For Mukti Australia, discovery again came before platform selection. Its legacy data was cleaned rather than simply transferred, donor journeys and segmentation were built into the implementation, finance workflows were connected with Xero, and the organisation’s specialist sponsorship model was deliberately preserved.
Different organisations. Different problems. But Rob drew four common lessons from them: start with processes rather than product demos; treat migration as transformation rather than simply moving data; design integrations alongside the CRM; and protect the things that are genuinely distinctive about how your organisation works.
And there is one more important point.
A CRM decision is not simply a fundraising or IT purchase. Fundraising outcomes should lead it, but finance, digital, operations, technology and leadership may all hold different pieces of the picture.
That cross-organisational thinking matters because ultimately, this isn’t really a conversation about software. It’s a conversation about whether your systems enable the fundraising you want to do.
Can you recognise when a donor is ready for their next step? Can you deliver the stewardship journey you’ve designed? Can information move between the systems that need it? Can your fundraisers trust the data in front of them? Can your team make routine changes without calling a developer?
And if the answer to some of those questions is no, a new CRM may be the answer – but it shouldn’t be the first assumption. Start with the donor journeys you need to deliver. Understand what’s stopping you from delivering them. Fix what can be fixed. Connect what needs connecting.
And only then, if your CRM genuinely can’t support where your fundraising needs to go, start shopping.
Because the question isn’t whether you have the ‘right’ CRM. It’s whether your CRM is doing enough to help you grow donor relationships.
Where to start
If you want a starting point, Heartburst’s CRM Health Check takes five minutes and gives you a personalised read on whether your CRM needs optimising, integrating or replacing. You’ll also receive a practical guide covering the five fixes, the donor journeys to test for, and the Discover–Design–Define–Evaluate–Decide process outlined above — so you leave with next steps, not just a diagnosis.
Take Heartburst’s CRM Health Check at heartburst.com.au/crm-health-check.
About Heartburst
Heartburst is a fundraising growth partner working with nonprofits across Australia and New Zealand on the systems behind their fundraising and supporter engagement, including CRM strategy and implementation, websites, data, integrations, donor and supporter engagement strategies and journey mapping, automations and workflows, reporting and technology adoption.
