FundSvcs Community

Hello everyone,

We are exploring the possibility of allowing campus partners access to our fundraising CRM to manage non-fundraising relationships. The idea is that having insight into vendor and university contacts could benefit our prospect researchers and gift officers.

However, we have some concerns. Our CRM is purpose-built for fundraising, as well as alumni and parent engagement, so adapting it to meet the needs of non-fundraising groups would require significant effort in system configuration and reporting. Additionally, we are mindful of potential risks, such as campus partners inadvertently using donation information inappropriately (e.g., selecting vendors based on their giving history). We have other hesitations but those are the main two.

Has anyone centralized non-fundraising relationship management within your fundraising CRM? If so, how has it worked for your institution, and what challenges have you encountered?

Looking forward to your insights!

We have granted access to a few colleagues in other departments. The main things we have had to look out for:

• License count limitations. We use Salesforce so we have a set number of licenses available and had to strategically provide access to folks
• Data storage limits - we regularly review our data storage to make sure we keep a good buffer between our storage max
• Security/Privacy. Making sure there is some way to limit non-pertinent fields to other partners through permission lockdown (view, edit, create, delete)

It does have its pros of having our partners enter in their own contact reports which saves us time and paints a more comprehensive picture for us of a constituent's engagement with us vs us not having access to that information or it living in another system. 

Hello everyone,

We are exploring the possibility of allowing campus partners access to our fundraising CRM to manage non-fundraising relationships. The idea is that having insight into vendor and university contacts could benefit our prospect researchers and gift officers.

However, we have some concerns. Our CRM is purpose-built for fundraising, as well as alumni and parent engagement, so adapting it to meet the needs of non-fundraising groups would require significant effort in system configuration and reporting. Additionally, we are mindful of potential risks, such as campus partners inadvertently using donation information inappropriately (e.g., selecting vendors based on their giving history). We have other hesitations but those are the main two.

Has anyone centralized non-fundraising relationship management within your fundraising CRM? If so, how has it worked for your institution, and what challenges have you encountered?

Looking forward to your insights!