Getting in Sync: Making Your CRM & Email Work Together

Whether you are considering a new Donor Database or if you’re well-established with a current database, it is an absolute requirement that your CRM works well with your email communication system. Without a good email/ database integration you’ll eventually end up with a great big mess.

Why is this important?

• When donors update their email addresses in your email system, you’ll want this to update inside their donor record. Without a smooth integration, you’ll either have to keep up with this manually or lose that updated info inside your CRM.

• An essential component of good donor management is recording individual donor communications, including email communications, inside each donor or contact record. Again, maintaining this manually is possible, but a lot of work and easy to forget to do.

• Segmented, targeted email communications is a requirement of a solid fundraising program. To make this happen, you need to be able to quickly and easily send relevant messages to a subset of your database. Because these important segments are generated from your database, you (really!) want to avoid having to export/import manually from database to email system every time you want to send an email to a group of donors.

There are two ideal situations where emails and donor databases work smoothly to keep all your emails perfectly in sync.

In the first instance your CRM has a built-in email system, where you can create and track your email right from within your database itself. Alternatively, your CRM may have built an integration that syncs back-and-forth with your preferred 3rd-party email provider. This is an important consideration when looking for a new CRM system.

Although most donor database systems these days do offer one of these solutions for integrating your communications, they aren’t always as easy to manage in practice as you were told in your software system demo, so you’ll really want to fully understand the integration and make sure it fits your needs.

Here are some things to consider:

• Often when a database comes with a built-in email system, it may not be as feature-rich or as user-friendly as some of the third-party providers built exclusively for email communications.

• Certain CRMs have an integration with only one specific email provider. Are you willing to use that email provider?

  For example, one new client who was invested in MailChimp, signed up for eTapestry which (currently) only integrates with Constant Contact. They now have to switch email providers or manually update the two systems.

• If a database includes an integration/ partnership with a third-party provider, you need to understand how the integration actually works in practice, because the nature of the integrations can be very different.

  For example, while Neon and Kindful both integrate with MailChimp, these integrations work in completely different ways. Kindful has a two-way sync into one master MailChimp audience while Neon pushes one-way into individual MailChimp audiences and requires some extra steps to keep the donor information up-to-date (at the time of this writing).

Need help evaluating or establishing email / CRM integrations? We can help you fully understand the differences between systems and/or get you up-and-running smoothly with your current CRM + email program.