By Haonan Tan

For years, CTEF has been relying on Excel worksheets to keep track of operational data such as donor information, student/school profiles and donation records. This may sound so last-century, yet it is actually how we operated. This approach apparently does not scale well, especially when CTEF added 1 + 1 student sponsorship program to its core operations. There are numerous donor management systems on the market. However, it is difficult to find a system that offers enough flexibility to accommodate various CTEF project types at a reasonable price. At some point, our database team almost wanted to build a new system from scratch.

Luckily, as we kept on evaluating potential solutions, we came across CRM, customer relationship management platform that can be tailored to support nonprofit organizations. For the past few months, the database team has become the CRM team, gathering requirements, implementing scenarios, writing user guides and testing the system. We use cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM mainly because of its significant price discount for nonprofits. The first phase of the project was just finished and all 1 + 1 sponsorship data for school year 2012 are now managed by CRM. This opens up future opportunities for better automation of common tasks, more advanced reporting and analytics, more flexible integration with other systems. A huge upgrade from spreadsheets, CRM will undoubtedly improve operation efficiency, boost productivity and help CTEF better serve its constituents.

Many thanks to the volunteers who worked closely as a team and made all the great things happen: Hong Liu, Billy Wang, Hao Sun, Zong Yang, Michelle Zou, Mindy He, Weijuan Shi and Laura Yang. Special thanks to Hong Liu, our CRM specialist and highly experienced CRM consultant¡ªalthough he is based far away (Toronto) from the rest of the team (Seattle), his contribution is most instrumental and his work is very much appreciated.