Does your CRM scale to key stakeholders? If it’s not, you run the risk of spawning “data silos”. This is one of the first signs that your CRM is “at-risk” of being on the way out.

Your board and volunteers should gain appropriate access. If they don’t, they may end up spending time creating something homemade anyway. Hello MailChimp, AirTable, Google Docs, and a whole host of other specialty tools. Wouldn’t you rather they spend that time on more productive efforts? At worst, they’ll just quit because you haven’t equipped them with tools that make the volunteer work enjoyable and relatively smooth.

What you can do now: evaluate what stakeholders are the lowest-hanging fruit to gain access. Is it a matter of a new permission level, configuration tweak or does the system need to be refactored to accommodate such access? Will you end up forgoing providing access to volunteers because of prohibitive license fees? This is why it’s critical to envision where your organization will be down the road.

You want a CRM that can grow with you.