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We pitched a topline user journey for our new community energy CRM to some experts who’ve built CRMs, advised organisations on CRMs, or use a CRM already in their own organisation.

Here’s that they said are the key considerations when it comes to a new CRM project.

Our thanks to :

1. Chloe Parker - Core Insights, database and impact measurement experts
2. Tom Neill-Eagle - cofounder of Plinth, a CRM and impact monitoring tool for socially positive organisations
3. Tom Close - develops CRM projects for clients with Oxford Code Lab
4. Rhodri Lewis - energy advisor with South East London Community Energy, working with local customers
5. Toby Costin - Director at Crew Energy, a London community energy group

Key takeaways (click to jump)

Do you really need a CRM? Be careful - terms are important!

Because the term "CRM" might confuse users who expect different functionalities based on their roles (e.g., fundraising vs. case management). Clear terminology and purpose-specific designs can help align user expectations with system capabilities.

<aside> 🧑‍⚕️ I hate the term ‘CRM’. So I think that can also partly be a problem sometimes because, if someone thinks of the CRM and then that person happens to work in fundraising, they'll expect it to do very different things to the client advisor who is expecting a case management system.

- Tom Neill-Eagle, cofounder at Plinth

</aside>

When starting a CRM project, aim for simplicity. Just replicate what the existing tool can do and do it better

Don’t aim to do everything, because CRM clients get very frustrated with functionality that isn’t perfect.

<aside> 👷 [If a organisation is already using spreadsheets as a CRM…]

One of the things that spreadsheets do really poorly is one-to-many relationships. So your classic thing, if you're doing case management, is ‘I've got a list of clients and I'm going to speak to those clients, and I need to make notes about my conversation’. That is really difficult to do in a spreadsheet, unless you get complicated and start doing multiple tabs and VLOOKUPs.

And even then, it's if I just want to read my interaction with that one client, it's hard.

So if you were, for example, to give someone a CRM where they could put on clients and they could make notes about those clients and see on a nice profile page the details about the clients and the history of the notes, then that is a big win over a spreadsheet.

- Tom Close, developer at Oxford Code Lab

</aside>

<aside> 👷 If they can go to their client list and download a CSV so that they can put that in a spreadsheet, with the unique identifier from your system. and they can add columns like ‘I bled radiators’ or whatever, then suddenly that's a halfway solution. You've offered a lot of value. They're still got the flexibility.

That's the sort of example of I'm talking about. And you're really working with a client incrementally and bringing them on step by step. Because otherwise there is that danger that you release the system, which is better in some ways and worse in others, and the ways that it's worse become important.

And once people have taken against your system, that seems like a hard perception to change.

- Tom Close, developer at Oxford Code Lab

</aside>

<aside> 🧑‍⚕️ The failure mode for every CRM is that it ticks all the boxes, but no one uses it because it doesn't quite tick the boxes a hundred percent.

- Tom Neill-Eagle, cofounder at Plinth

</aside>

<aside> 👷 What we've done successfully with customers is give them something that is better than what they've got, but it's really simple. But doesn't meet all the things they need to do.

But they can write in notes or something. And then over time layer on them so we get to the the full, rich data-capture-type-thing.

- Tom Close, developer at Oxford Code Lab

</aside>