Switching to a charity CRM: the move is smaller than the fear

Define what you need, not what you do

Wherever you're switching from, the biggest scoping mistake is often the same: treating your current way of working as the specification.

"A CRM should support how you work, not force you to change everything. But, don't treat your current processes as the requirement either. Most of them exist because they're what you've always done, not because they're the best way to work."

- Graham Dunn, Customer Success Lead, Donorfy

The Access Not for Profit onboarding team see a close cousin of the same oversight: charities scoping their new CRM around what other organisations do, rather than what they need.

For spreadsheet charities, that means not rebuilding the spreadsheet in new clothes. For CRM movers, it means resisting the urge to migrate fifteen years of workarounds just because they're familiar.

Either way, start with what you want out the other side: income you're not currently reaching, hours you'd like back, and questions you'd like answered without an export.

The spreadsheet has served you well. It's flexible, it's free, and it got your fundraising this far. But, somewhere along the way, it started doing a job it was never designed for: it lives on a shared drive, three people understand it, one person really understands it, and every Gift Aid claim involves more time than you have to give.

Plenty of charities are in the same place, but the sector isn't standing still: the Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 found 81% of charities made progress with digital this year, up from 60% the year before, with small charities closing the gap on larger ones.

The common worries we hear, meanwhile, tend to shrink the moment the move starts:

"We'll lose our data."

You won't! Your spreadsheet gets imported into your new CRM, and you keep your original files until you're completely confident everything has moved across.

"We don't have an IT team."

You're really not likely to need one. Cloud-based CRMs have nothing to install and nothing to host. Inspiration: Naomi Cook is the only permanent paid employee at Sidmouth Independent Lifeboat and now Donorfy is at the centre of everything she does, saying, "I just needed to make a leap and just crack on with it."

"We can't afford the time."

Truth be told, few people can afford the time lost to using work-around processes that a new CRM could improve. Look at what the time you spend buys long term. The move itself takes a matter of weeks, and every month beyond returned hours once spent on manual thank yous, hand-built Gift Aid claims and copy-paste reporting.

Helpful reading: The great charity CRM vs spreadsheet debate

• Tidy the spreadsheet (at least a little)

Don't let perfect data become the reason you never start! Ideally, you'll need consistent names, addresses and donation history. Any decent CRM provides import templates showing exactly what format to use; Donorfy's onboarding team will also help you check your data before it goes in. 

• Import your supporters and donations

Constituents, donations and Gift Aid declarations come across into your new system. This is the shortest part of the whole process for most small charities, and almost every charity says afterwards that the nerves were bigger than the work.

• Connect your tools

Link Mailchimp, JustGiving, Stripe or your website donation forms so new donations flow in without anyone retyping them.

• Learn as you go

Your CRM supplier should give you ways to get resources and training for free. For example, Donorfy has the Donorfy Academy, a searchable knowledge base, and a community of fellow fundraisers you can lean on. Implementation packages exist if you'd like more hands-on help, but plenty of small charities self-serve.

• Keep the spreadsheet (for now)

Run old and new side by side until you fully trust the new, which shouldn't take long. Then enjoy the deeply satisfying moment of archiving the spreadsheet for good!

A CRM-to-CRM move usually carries more weight: more data, more history, more people whose working day changes. Three questions come up in almost every move, and all three have better answers than most teams expect ...

1. "What happens to our data?"

Short answer: it all comes with you, and nothing gets switched off until you've checked it.

This is the big one. A well-run migration doesn't lose data, it just moves it – and only the data you still genuinely need. Your constituents, donation history, Gift Aid declarations, communication preferences and relationships move across in stages, and your old system sits untouched until you've verified everything.

The scale question matters less than you'd potentially think, too. For example, North West Air Ambulance Charity had hundreds of thousands of records, and Acorns Children's Hospice did too. Brake cleaned and migrated around 60,000 successfully. If your database is smaller than that, and it very likely is, your migration is smaller too.

"No migration should ever be a leap of faith, and none of ours are. We map your data, run test imports, and you review real records in Donorfy before anything goes live. The charities who arrive most nervous tend to be the ones most surprised by how methodical the whole thing is."

- Tom Chapman, Senior Technical Consultant, Access Not For Profit

2. "How do we get the board on board?"

Short answer: bring numbers, and a plan with names and dates on it.

Trustees tend to hesitate if there's risk they can't see the edges of, and/or benefits that don't have a number on. Here's some measures that can help:

• The cost of staying put. Licence fees for a system the team works around, plus all the staff hours going into manual processes. Snow Camp calculated their efficiency gains after switching from eTapestry as the equivalent of a full-time role. Framed in hours and salary costs, your software ask becomes less of an IT request.
• The income you're missing. If your CRM can't tell you who's lapsing, who could give more and which appeals actually performed, there's lost income hiding inside that admin problem.
• A de-risked plan. A named project lead, a phased timeline that steers clear of your biggest appeal, and a structured implementation programme with the effort ask published up front: a typical FlightPath needs 32 to 50 hours from your team, total. Boards approve plans, not products.

Further reading: Guide to getting your board on board with a CRM swtich

3. "Will the team come with us?"

Short answer: they will if they help choose it.

In our experience, teams better adopt systems they helped choose. Bring your frequent CRM users into scoping, and make sure the new system improves their daily tasks. Get that right and go-live becomes something the team is looking forward to rather than bracing for. 

Whichever provider you're considering, ask to see their implementation methodology in writing, with numbers attached: how many hours from your team, how many weeks to go-live, who does the migration. 

For both Donorfy and Access Charity CRM, that methodology is called a FlightPath – a structured onboarding programme with a named onboarder guiding you through each stage.

FlightPaths are sized by database, not by ambition: there's a Seedling for charities with up to 5,000 constituents, another for charities with up to 30,000 constituents and one for 30,000 to 150,000, with additional migration available above that. 

A typical implementation asks for 32 to 50 hours of your team's time in total, and 70% of customers are live in less than 20 weeks, with the very quickest landing in 8. Here's the shape of it:

• Welcome & Installation

Getting you set up from day one

Your journey begins with a welcome call; an introduction to your onboarding consultant and the team. At this point, your system is installed and you get access to the platform straight away. There's no waiting period before you can start exploring.

• Scoping & initiation

Understanding your world

This is where we get under the skin of your organisation. Your onboarding consultant works with you to understand your workflows, goals and any specific needs, so your CRM is shaped around how you work.

• Build: configuration & data

Shaping the system to fit

The build phase is where your system takes shape. We help you configure Donorfy to match your needs, and work with you to migrate your data, so only accurate, usable information comes across.

• Training & validation

Making sure you're confident

With your system configured and data loaded, it's time to (officially) train your team and validate everything works as expected. Your onboarding consultant guides you through, explaining what to look for, and shares best practice from many other implementations.

• Go Live

Your first day on the system

Before go-live, we run through a pre-live checklist with you. It's a defined set of outcomes you confirm are complete and, once you're happy, you go live with confidence.

• Adoption & sign off

Closing the loop

Shortly after go-live, you'll have a Q&A session where you can ask any questions. We then do a quick review to check and confirm you've successfully onboarded. Once passed, onboarding is officially complete.

Some basic questions to ask any CRM provider:

Take these into every demo, Donorfy's included:

• How many hours will this ask of my team, and can I see that in writing?
• Who actually does the data migration, you or us?
• Can we implement the CRM ourselves and, if so, how?
• What happens if the sample migration surfaces problems?
• Is training included, or an add-on with a day rate?
• How does Gift Aid claiming work, and is HMRC submission built in?

Scaled to fit: a spreadsheet charity's "project team" might be one person and a supportive trustee, and that's fine.

• Name a project lead with real decision-making authority to keep things moving
• Time it around your income calendar: keep go-live well clear of your biggest appeal
• Audit your data and agree what migrates, what archives, what dies
• Budget honestly, including implementation, training time and a contingency
• Brief your board early with the plan, the timeline and the cost of staying put
• Involve your heaviest users from scoping onwards; they make or break adoption
• Run a risk assessment with contingency plans, including rollback points
• Plan parallel running and agree the criteria for switching the old system off
• Communicate constantly, including delays; people back projects they hear about early and often
• Mark the moment: retiring a legacy system, spreadsheet or CRM, deserves a proper celebration!

Every charity on this page had a full calendar and a plausible reason to wait a year.

What they found is that switching to a charity CRM asks far less than expected: the move itself was over in weeks, and the time it handed back started paying out immediately.

So, whether your starting point is a spreadsheet on a shared drive or a renewal date circled on the calendar, the conversation costs nothing, and the view from the other side is good.