CRM Strategy Assessment & Roadmap; Development Operations Team Organizational Design (2024)
Orbis International is a nonprofit building strong and sustainable eye care systems globally to put treatment and prevention within reach. We supported the nonprofit in fleshing out their US-based developmental operations (DevOps) team and finding opportunities for their constituent relationship management (CRM) strategy. We worked with DevOps to better understand their staffing and tech pain points, and based on our findings, we assessed their change readiness to gauge which transformational initiatives they were ready to pursue.
We tailored our findings and deliverables to help meet Orbis where they were, while providing realistic recommendations for how to grow their technology and staffing sustainably to support their fundraising journey over the next five years. Our findings sought to capitalize on the strengths within the existing staff and tech tools, while flagging that a lack of adoption of their current donor CRM (Raiser’s Edge) and a nascent Development culture around the use of data and systems could impede short-term tech transformation.
Our recommendations boiled down to “stabilize before you transform.” Using a three-legged-stool metaphor – where People, Process, & Technology serve as the three legs supporting Strategy and founded upon Culture – to recommend the following path forward:
CRM Strategy & Roadmap
- Short-term upgrade from Raiser’s Edge on-premise to RE7, to take advantage of efficiencies of a cloud-hosted application and reduce barriers to entry, thereby ensuring users were using the current system before being asked to adopt a new one.
- Then, after stabilizing on RE7, subsequently running a selection process to identify new CRM tools from a range of product options with our pro/con comparisons.
- Inventoried critical business process and data quality improvements that needed to be documented and optimized in advance of a CRM migration.
- Supplied agile Product Management practices, templates, and training to help staff assess and prioritize system requirements now and in the future.
Development Operations Team Organizational Design
We developed an Development Ops staffing model that better positioned it as a strategic partner to fundraising leads, rather than help desk. The new model included:
- Staff roles with stronger expertise in technology, business analysis, and project mgmt. To support future fundraising innovations, large and small
- An enhanced team lead role with experience aligning tech, data, and process with the org’s evolving fundraising strategies
- Freeing up strategic capacity by divesting DevOps of low-level administrative work and onerous data mgmt. tasks through outsourcing and reallocation of tasks internally
