Do You Need a CRM Administrator for Your Nonprofit?

“CRM administrator” is the kind of job title that sounds expensive; it feels like you need a line item in your budget just to read the words (don’t worry, you don’t). For most small and midsize nonprofits, though, your operations aren’t complex enough to require a CRM administrator on staff. 

Well, sort of. You won’t need a full-time CRM administrator, but you will need someone to oversee some basic database management tasks. They’ll have to decide which fields exist in your database, who gets to fill them in, and what happens to a record if the person attached to it stops giving. 

For nonprofits in this range, managing your CRM means setting boundaries between the core duties that your staffer with admin-level access will handle and those that your fundraising staff can take care of on their own. It also means taking advantage of the self-service capabilities (if any) that your CRM of choice has on offer.  

In this article, we’ll cover what a CRM administrator actually does, which tasks a non-technical fundraiser can handle alone in Neon CRM, which ones genuinely should be left to your admin, and how small and midsize orgs should approach this role.

What is a CRM Administrator?

A CRM administrator is the person who oversees the basic building blocks of your CRM platform. They manage what data points get included, what tools and capabilities can be used, and what level of access different users have.

As for the size and scope of the role itself, that part varies wildly from org to org. A CRM administrator at one nonprofit could be a full-time certified specialist making six figures. The CRM administrator at another org could be someone whose admin duties take up 30 minutes per week. 

To dive a little deeper, it helps to think about everything that CRM platforms can do as two layers. There’s a top layer where you do the work, and there’s a bottom layer where somebody decides how that work happens.

Pulling a list of everyone who gave in November is the first layer. Deciding that your database will have a field called “Board Interest” is the second. So is deciding that the field will offer exactly four options, and that every staff member is expected to pick one of them. 

That bottom layer is the realm of the CRM administrator. The top layer can be run by staff in fundraising, donor relations, events staff, etc. 

For most orgs, the bulk of the CRM administrator’s work is going to happen during onboarding when the CRM is being configured, with small bursts of ongoing maintenance duties moving forward. In these instances, database administration is an important part of someone’s duties; it’s just not their main focus.

Then again, there’s another factor that will determine how much work is needed to manage your nonprofit’s CRM, and that’s what type of CRM you have.

Product CRMs vs Platform CRMs: What’s the Difference?

There are two basic kinds of nonprofit CRMs: Platform CRMs, which require a ton of technical knowledge to build and maintain, and product CRMs, which don’t require any technical or coding know-how and are designed for everyday folks. Nonprofits using a platform CRM are going to require a full-time administrator, while nonprofits using a product CRM will not.

Product CRMs are built to solve a defined set of problems. Neon CRM, for instance, lets you handle donor management, fundraising, communications, and reporting out of the box, with other functions—namely, events, volunteer, and membership—available as add-on modules. The tools are already built and ready to go; your staff just needs to do some minor configuring, like adding some custom fields and your brand assets. 

Setup with product CRMs is relatively fast, and your CRM vendor is responsible for maintaining and upgrading the system’s backend. Overall, maintaining the system can be a piece of someone’s role, not their primary focus. 

Platform CRMs take the opposite approach. They hand you a highly configurable but mostly blank foundation and let you build whatever you want on top of it. For large nonprofits with complex operations, that flexibility makes a huge difference. But it also means that your org has to shoulder a lot of technical responsibility.

 On a platform system, nobody has decided what a “household” means in your database, or whether a lapsed recurring donor counts as lapsed at 30 days or at 90. You decide, you build that structure yourself, and you maintain it every time your programs change. Building and maintaining all of that is the work of a dedicated, full-time CRM administrator.

If you’re still working out what you actually need, start with the core CRM features small nonprofits should look for, then move on to the best CRMs for small nonprofits when you’re ready to compare your options.

Here’s What You Can Do in Neon CRM Without Admin-Level Access

Neon CRM was designed to minimize the need for admin-level access. You can set up fundraising campaigns, build forms and emails, run reports, and set up events or volunteer opportunities (plus a whole lot more) as a regular user. It’s one of the reasons we offer unlimited seats in your system at no extra cost—so that everyone can pitch in. 

Here’s a thorough, if not exhaustive, list of what you can do inside Neon CRM without touching a single setting, filing a single ticket, or (shudders) having to find out what an API is. 

• Reports: Neon CRM includes One-Click Reports that come built and filtered in advance, covering things like current-year donation totals, your top 100 donors, upcoming membership expirations, and SYBUNT/ LYBUNT lists. You can adjust the columns on any of those reports without rebuilding the report itself.
• Dashboards: Mission Control is a customizable dashboard available to every user, with dozens of widgets covering campaign progress, key metrics, event stats, pending donations, and your activity calendar. You’ll arrange those widgets yourself, and you can lay them out however you like.
• Fundraising: Add prospect records, log grant applications, note down the coffee you had with a board member’s neighbor, upload a signed pledge form to someone’s profile, and add a note after a phone call that went better than you expected. 
• Campaigns: Create a campaign, set its goal, nest it under a parent campaign when it belongs to something larger, and watch revenue accumulate against that goal as gifts arrive. 
• Events: Sell tickets, take registrations, assign tables and seats, apply a comped or discounted registration for a sponsor, and check people in at the door. Afterward, you’ll pull attendance and revenue numbers from the same reporting screens you use for everything else. 
• Volunteers: Post opportunities, schedule shifts, and create and approve timesheets so hours post to the volunteer’s own record alongside their giving history. 
• Email & Texting: Build an email or text, create the audience you want to send it to, and send it. Communications is its own permission category, so an organization that wants to keep mass email in fewer hands can narrow it for one group without touching the rest of that group’s access. 
• Memberships: You’ll enroll new members, take renewals and record the payments, move someone between levels when they upgrade, and keep expiration dates current on the record. Membership is its own permission category in Neon CRM, so a fundraiser can be given all of it without being given any of the system plumbing alongside it.
• Duplicate Cleanup: Merging duplicates is the single best habit a small team can build, because everything downstream of your donor data depends on it. That includes things like segmentation, reporting, and the board update you have coming up.

Add all of that up, and it’s clear that a fundraiser can run an entire development program inside Neon CRM without administrator access. 

And Here’s What Admins Can Do in Neon CRM

Admin-level users in Neon CRM get to oversee a lot of the features that govern how your work is done: They manage global settings, create user groups, handle payment processing, and build workflows. 

In other words, they handle the invisible plumbing that supports all the great work your team does—and that they’ll only ever think about when something goes massively horribly wrong.

Here’s another full (but not comprehensive) list of the areas that only admin-level users can access in Neon CRM. 

• Global Settings: This is the big one, and it’s first on the list for a reason. Global Settings is where the decisions live that everybody else has to work inside for the next several years, which is exactly the sort of thing you want to limit access to. 
• Automated Workflows: These are what power Neon CRM’s automation engine, where you set a trigger, a target, and the action that follows. One person’s decision there applies to everyone on the team, which is why they require an additional level of access (and the extra care that comes with it) to build them.
• Payment Processing: How your organization takes money is, and always should be, an administrator-level decision, which is probably the most obvious sentence in this entire post. This permission covers any payment processor you might use, including Neon Pay. 
• QuickBooks & Constant Contact Syncs: The integrations between your Neon CRM system and your books are administrator-only. So is your Constant Contact connection (and so are CRA receipts for Canadian organizations). Make sure that whoever is managing your QuickBooks Online or your Constant Contact accounts has a direct line of communication with the staffer who’s managing your CRM.
• User Groups & Access: Only Administrators can manage user groups, user accounts, passwords, and API access. When somebody leaves, one person has to remember to deactivate their login, which also kills any API key attached to it. And vice versa when someone joins. 

That’s an important list of tasks, but for most orgs, it’s not something that’s going to consume 40 hours a week. And that’s why small and midsize nonprofits aren’t going to need a full-time CRM administrator to manage their Neon CRM.

For larger orgs, it could be a different story, if only because the added complexity of their operation could mean that having one dedicated Neon CRM specialist on staff would be more helpful than five or seven generalists.

After all, once you’re running multi-channel campaigns, a handful of integrations, and layered gift structures across a bigger team, asking your development director to handle all of that on top of fundraising is how they become your ex-development director. 

Name a CRM System Owner Instead

For a small or midsize nonprofit, the best approach to managing their CRM is to name a system owner. This is a staff member you already have who’s responsible for all that plumbing work like customization, data standards, and user access. You don’t hire anybody new; you simply add a line to a job description that already exists.

Naming the owner is the easy part. Actually setting them up for success is a bit harder. It requires that you take six specific steps…

Remember, the advantages of a great CRM are both small and numerous. It’s a bunch of individual actions—an hour saved here, a personalized message there—that add up over time. But it can take a little while. 

According to research from G2, the average nonprofit CRM buyer sees a full return on investment at 16.95 months, against an average contract length of 11.5 months. In other words, they don’t see a full return until after the first contract they signed has already expired.

If you’re the system owner at your nonprofit and you’re confident that you’re using your CRM well but have yet to see that full ROI, be patient. All that work is going to pay off. 

How NAMI Greater Mississippi Valley Does More Without a Dedicated CRM Administrator. 

NAMI Greater Mississippi Valley is a small team doing a lot of work, and they’ve been running on Neon CRM since 2017.

They report operating 50% more efficiently with Neon CRM in place. Their NAMIWalks event raises around $150,000 a year, which is roughly a third of their annual budget. 

And they’re doing it all without a dedicated CRM administrator. They’re just a small staff that learned the software and kept their data in order.

You can do the same. 

You Need a CRM Owner, Not an Administrator

For small and midsize nonprofits, money can be tight. And that’s why getting a CRM can sound so scary. The benefits sound nice but vague, while the costs sound very real—especially if you’re convinced you have to hire a full-time CRM admin.

But you don’t. By choosing a product CRM that comes with all the features you need built-in, an interface that your staff feels comfortable using, and ample training resources to ensure that you stay up to date, naming one staff member a (part-time!) system owner will be more than enough. 

That’s Neon CRM in a nutshell. It’s designed to fit the needs of small and mid-size nonprofits, with all-in-one features, unified data streams, unlimited seats, and few limits on the tasks that regular users can perform within the system as they put all those tools—and all that data—to good use.

If you’d like to learn more about Neon CRM, you can take a self-guided tour by clicking the button below, or book a live demo to receive a personalized overview of how the system can help your org raise more. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Nonprofit CRM Administrators