We Love Our Clients
We always love it when a client we’ve worked with in the past comes back to us with another project. It’s one of the highest compliments we can receive as we strive to be a trusted partner to nonprofits with amazing missions. The News Literacy Project’s mission to advance the development of news literacy in education is extremely critical…especially now.
That’s one reason why we were thrilled to partner with the News Literacy Project (NLP) for a third time. This time, they asked us to help answer this question: “Is our current CRM serving our needs?”
The Mission
The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit founded in 2008, is building a national movement to create systemic change in American education to ensure all students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers. Taken from the News Literacy Project’s website.
The Situation
As you might imagine from their mission, the proliferation of ways people can get information–and misinformation–has grown exponentially in our digital age. NLP’s mission to make sure students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school means that their curriculum is in demand. NLP experienced a lot of rapid growth, and with it, the need to better evaluate the impact of their work.
The Tech Stack
For many years, NLP had been using a combined CRM and digital solution as their primary data hub, fundraising tool, and digital marketing solution. This setup had served them well for many years. It eliminated data silos and allowed NLP to leverage automations and personalization. Having everything in one central place made it easy to track how supporters engaged with NLP…to a point.
The Gaps
School Districts: One gap that became apparent over time was the need to track data at the school district level. This is a specialized data model that not every nonprofit needs, and not every CRM has built-in. Most CRMs built for nonprofit advocacy can accommodate data at the county and municipal level. School districts are yet another layer of complicated data that changes more frequently in response to population growth or decrease, and commensurate expansion or consolidation of school district borders. It’s a lot to keep on top of.
Data-Driven Strategy: As NLP’s programming grew, so did their desire to have more sophisticated reporting that allowed them to have a data-driven approach to their strategy. A CRM is a great place to store a lot of data and track relationships between the contact records. It’s less good at analyzing, slicing, and dicing that data–especially when an organization has to repurpose some fields to accommodate data that isn’t part of the primary data model (i.e. school districts).
The Answer(s)
The question was: “Is our current CRM serving our needs?” The answer was twofold:
Yes. And also No.
Project over!
Just kidding.
The Details
Yes! The News Literacy Project’s solution was supporting their fundraising and digital marketing needs quite well. It was clear that they are leveraging the fundraising and automation capabilities at an expert level, and the technology is capably supporting their sophisticated fundraising and marketing program. Their Operations Manual is a thing of beauty. Their email marketing team is a well-oiled machine and their engagement results are very strong. People want the content they are putting out–and their system’s capabilities helped them engage their supporters.
No! But reporting by functional program was not an area of strength for their solution, especially when so much of the work needs to be mapped to the school district level. As well, educator tools and curriculum built or facilitated by NLP means there are multiple schemas of data they need to absorb. Some of it fits well into a nonprofit CRM, and some of it doesn’t.
The Recommendation
If you’ve read this far, you might be able to guess what we ended up recommending to NLP to help organize and analyze their data: a data warehouse or lakehouse, connected to a reporting and visualization tool. The multiple different sources of data and the need to bring it all together to see what story the data is telling is a great use case for this type of setup.
The Lesson: Be Surprised and Delighted
The question at the beginning of the project called for a binary answer: either yes, let’s keep our CRM, or no, let’s get rid of it. But the answer ended up being not “yes or no,” but “yes, and!” Our strong partnership with the News Literacy Project allowed us to view their description of what was holding them back from a different perspective than a simple yes or no. And their trust in us to describe how our findings pointed to a different answer than they were expecting allowed us to arrive together at a recommendation that felt exactly right.
We can’t wait to see how this technology change will help the News Literacy Project scale their mission in the years to come. Find our more about the News Literacy Project at the website.
A Testimonial
We are grateful to Freeda Brook from the News Literacy Project for providing this testimonial:
“We have been consistently impressed with how Raise HECK combines industry expertise and insightful analysis to produce tailored, specific, and achievable recommendations. We’ve worked with Charlotte and Sally on multiple projects to enhance our digital marketing and evaluate our CRM. We keep coming back because in every project they take the time to truly understand our needs and requirements; they gather broad input from across our organization, and they provide clear assessments that consider both the technical and human aspects of our work. With every engagement, we have received a road map of recommended actions and guidance on managing these internal changes, which has set us up for several successful transformations of our digital marketing and data management practices over the last three years.”
Freeda Brook
News Literacy Project
Work With Us
We bring our experience-based analysis to every project we do. We strive to identify gaps and opportunities that can help your nonprofit save money, raise more money, increase engagement, and more. If your nonprofit needs help in any area, get in touch with us today.