Planning a Nonprofit Digital Transformation: A Guide to Seamless Tech Migration
Fear of missing out vs. fear of messing up: Which one is winning out on your team?
Tech tools and trends change fast, and the nonprofit world isn’t immune to that pressure to stay current. For many organizations, this shift is part of a broader nonprofit digital transformation aimed at modernizing systems and improving how teams engage supporters. An up-to-date, fully functional tech stack can open the door to digital fundraising strategies that wouldn’t be possible otherwise — not to mention how much easier daily work becomes with the right tooling.
But deciding to migrate to a new platform is not a simple choice. There are risks involved with making a swap. There’s bound to be some disruption in your team’s day-to-day and you may have to take extra precautions to be sure you don’t lose crucial donor data. How do you weigh the desire to stay current with the possible risks of keeping things the same?
In this article, we’re sharing a method to help you sidestep the madness that can come with a tech migration. By taking a zoomed-out look at your current stack, watching for warning signs that it’s no longer meeting your needs, and making a planned, deliberate jump into the migration process, you can change your tooling without important details falling through the cracks and take a more strategic approach to your nonprofit digital transformation strategy.
Let’s get into it!
Watch instead: Check out our recent webinar on demand! Leading Change with Confidence: A Nonprofit Leader’s Guide to Transforming Your Fundraising Tech Stack
Where to Start Your Nonprofit Digital Transformation: Processes vs. Technology
Start by identifying the true root cause of your problems. At first glance, it might seem like your tech stack is to blame, but overly complex processes could be weighing your team down. Julie Gibson, President of SJ Consulting, recommends starting with the results you’d like to see:
“Starting with the results that you want is so critical,” she said. “What are those end goals? If you had a blank slate, what would that look like?”
Step 1: Picture the Results You Want
When thinking about the larger nonprofit digital transformation process, you first need to get clear on the results you want to achieve. Maybe you want an easy way to capture your offline donor information in your CRM, or you’re hoping for more integration between your email platform, P2P program, and events management tool. Or perhaps your team is begging for a simpler option to use so they can spend less time figuring out finicky details and more time focusing on your mission.
Step 2: Imagine How Your Team Could Get There
Successful nonprofit digital transformation requires clear planning and a strong understanding of your current roadblocks. What is actually stopping your team from getting the results you want? Are your projects stalling out because you lack a defined process for reaching your goals, or are the results you want simply not possible with your current tooling? This is the tough part — be as objective and honest as possible in your assessment.
It’s a good idea to lean on your in-house experts for guidance here. Seek out the people in your organization who spend hours day in and day out working with your current system. Chances are, they can pinpoint exactly where the problems are.
This is also a great point in time to get an objective third-party opinion. An outside consultant can give you a big-picture assessment without any built-in bias toward your current tech stack or existing processes.
5 Signs Your Tech Stack Is Holding Back Your Digital Transformation
Let’s say you’ve decided to do an in-house evaluation — what are the warning signs that your tech stack is the problem (not your processes)? Here are a few common issues to look out for:
- Problems with data quality: Your donor data is scattered across separate systems and your team can’t access a single, unified view.
- Communication breakdowns: Teams work in isolated silos with disconnected systems.
- Inaccurate or unwieldy reporting: Creating reports is a difficult, time-consuming process that requires manual data corrections.
- Manual workarounds: Your team has to develop elaborate spreadsheets and multi-step processes to work around your tech stack.
- Stalled strategic work: Your organization can’t act on its highest priorities because your tooling can’t support them.
Sarah Festa, VP of Development Marketing and Operations at the Jane Goodall Institute USA, went through the tech migration process after realizing that her current stack just didn’t fit her team’s direct marketing and digital fundraising goals.
It took a long time to make the decision to migrate, Sarah said: “We were trying to get the current tech stack to do the things we wanted to and to give it a chance, and we got to the point where we had to admit to ourselves that it wasn’t going to work.”
Outgrowing your tech stack is frustrating. The problems that come with outdated tooling can bog your team down, waste time and resources, and lead to higher overhead costs as you scramble to hire outside help. And, left long enough, ill-fitting tech can contribute to staff burnout and even cause retention problems. After all, your people want to spend their time focused on your mission, not fighting with your tech.
Once it’s clear that your tech stack can no longer serve your organization’s needs, it’s time to get the digital transformation process underway.
Leading Change During a Nonprofit Digital Transformation
Change management isn’t an easy process, but with some planning, you can take some of the uncertainty and discomfort out of the experience. Here’s how:
Build a Core Tech Migration Team
Forming a nonprofit digital transformation team starts with identifying the people in your organization who need to be front and center in the tech migration process. These are your staff members who must be heavily involved in each step of the planning and decision-making — think core stakeholders. There are plenty of ways to structure your team (you can get some great tips here), but keep in mind that your core team should function well together, be in constant communication, and be willing to make important decisions.
Be Explicit About Who Owns Decision-Making
If decision-making authority is shared by too many people, your migration project is liable to stall. Set up an explicit framework that details who ultimately makes the decisions about the most important parts of your project.
The RACI framework is one approach for this. RACI defines what role (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed) each stakeholder plays throughout the migration process. This may seem like an extra step to take, but deciding as a group who has the ultimate say will help you meet your major milestones.
Julie cautions that getting the balance right can be tricky when it comes to assigning decision-making authority. If too few stakeholders are involved, you could find yourself facing significant pushback from staff members who weren’t consulted about the change, but are highly affected by it. On the flip side, if too many stakeholders are involved, it can stall the project entirely.
“We’ve seen in projects where it becomes an analysis paralysis,” Julie said. “You have so many people involved in the decision-making that no decision ever gets made.”
Keep Your Leadership Team Engaged
Seeing the digital transformation process through at your nonprofit will involve an engaged leadership team. Connect with leadership early and often to get them on board with the tech migration. If you can secure an executive sponsor who’s willing to offer their full support from start to finish, even better: Project success is often closely tied to the effectiveness of your sponsor.
Overall, try to avoid getting into a situation where your leadership team feels confused about the current status of your project.
“When they sign the contract, that is not the first time they should be hearing about this change,” Sarah said.
Give Yourself Ample Time
Start your project planning (and your outreach to leadership) well ahead of your digital transformation target migration date. At the Jane Goodall Institute, Sarah and her team began communicating their plans over a year before their target date. They started by reviewing their current contracts and determining when they needed to have a new platform fully in place to avoid gaps or disruptions.
“We established our hard stops for when we really had to make a move, and we backtracked from there,” Sarah said. “The conversations with leadership and getting everybody on board were the things that actually took the most amount of time, and we did have to pivot a few times.”
Communicate Again and Again (and Again)
Embed clear, consistent communication in every step of the digital transformation migration process. Each stakeholder involved should be kept updated based on their decision-making role — those who need to be part of the decision-making process should be in the room, while those who need to be informed just need access to a steady stream of updates as your migration team makes progress.
Communicating closely with stakeholders within your nonprofit also helps to build trust, says Sarah. Her core migration team proactively kept colleagues plugged in to the project, which ultimately made them feel like their needs would be taken into account.
“It wasn’t that they were not at the table in the decision-making; it’s that we did the prework of communicating what they needed and then built trust to be able to represent their needs in the change management and in the selection,” said Sarah. “By the time we got to the selection, they trusted that we would have their best interests for their audience as well as ours.”
See How the Jane Goodall Institute USA Is Using Engaging Networks
Weigh Your Tooling Options: Point vs. All-in-One vs. Hybrid Solutions
Choosing the right digital fundraising platform can be the hardest step of the process. There are plenty of options out there, and the right fit for your organization depends entirely on your specific needs:
- All-in-one solutions: These comprehensive digital fundraising platforms house everything you need in one spot. Your data is fully connected and you get complete internal ownership, but there may be slower development velocity compared to other options.
- Point solutions: Since these tools are tailor-made for a specific purpose, you get cutting-edge functionality for a singular use case — but that’s it. You’ll have to patch these together with other tools for complete coverage, and you may run into trouble with data connectivity and integrations.
- Hybrid solutions: These represent a middle ground between all-in-one and point solutions. They can be the best of both worlds for some organizations, but may be complicated to use.
The selection process can get tough, so check out more info and recommendations here: Standalone Superstars or Cohesive, Consummate Pros: What Kind of Team is your Nonprofit Technology Stack?
Overall, keep in mind that the best option for one nonprofit won’t be the best choice for another. Focus on satisfying the most crucial requirements for your specific team.
Envisioning a Successful Nonprofit Digital Transformation
Change is intimidating and risky, but it can be invigorating, too! Sarah recommends “leading with the excitement” of the new possibilities that a platform migration opens up as a way to build hype and get stakeholders focused on the positive.
“Keep your eye on the ball both in terms of your hard deadline (like ours, with the contract deadlines) but also on all of the exciting things that you’re going to be able to build,” Sarah advised. “That investment of time will be worth it.”
If you’ve gotten used to a slow-moving, ill-fitting patchwork of tools, just imagine what you and your team can accomplish after migrating to a new stack. Goals that were previously unrealistic become possible; distracted, frustrated staff members can get back to doing the work they love. And your organization can make a greater impact on your cause.
Ready to Start Your Digital Transformation Process? Talk To a Member of the Engaging Networks Team
Engaging Networks is an all-in-one, easy-to-use digital fundraising platform. Talk to a member of our team today and see if we’re the right fit for your organization.
