The Five-Minute CRM Health Check

CRM problems do not announce themselves. They show up as "the report doesn't look right," "we keep losing donors after their second gift," or "marketing wants something but the data team can't do it this week." By the time anyone names the underlying issue, it has been quietly costing money for a year.

This is the diagnostic I run with charity teams as the first conversation, before any audit, demo, or migration talk. It takes five minutes. It will not solve anything on its own - it tells you where to look first.

The five questions

1. What percentage of records have an email and a postcode?

Run two counts: total active records, and records with both an email and a postcode populated. Divide.

Healthy charities sit above 80%. Mid-range charities sit at 50–70%. Below 50% and your "audience" is actually a small subset of your audience, with the rest invisible to most of your campaigns.

This is the single fastest indicator of CRM health, because email + postcode unlocks geosegmentation, doorstep tools, and de-duplication. Without them, you are running blind.

2. How many gifts in the last 12 months are not linked to a campaign?

In any half-decent CRM, gifts should be tagged with a source - appeal, event, email, web, regular. Run a report of all gifts in the last 12 months without a source. Divide by total gift count.

If more than 10% are unattributed, your ROI numbers are guesses. The first thing to fix is not "better tracking" - it is the data-entry workflow that lets gifts in without a tag.

3. What is your duplicate rate on contacts?

Most CRMs have a duplicate detection tool. Run it. If yours does not, search for the most common surname in your data and count how many records share it. A messy database will surface obvious doubles in seconds.

Some duplicates are unavoidable (married names, household members). The dangerous kind is when the same person appears with two preference centres - one says "yes to email," the other says "no." That is a regulatory issue waiting to happen.

4. When was the last record updated?

Sort the contact table by "last modified" descending. Look at the bottom of the list. If the oldest "last modified" date is three years ago and the record is still marked active, you have stale data masquerading as a supporter base.

A simple rule of thumb: any active record untouched for 36 months should be flagged for re-permission or archive. Doing this once is a project; building it into a quarterly rhythm is operations.

5. Can you, today, list every donor who gave between £100 and £499 in the last 18 months and lives within 30 miles of a specific postcode?

Time yourself. If it takes more than 10 minutes, you have a segmentation problem. Probably not in the data - in the tool, or in the skills around it.

This is the question that uncovers whether your CRM is a system of record (it stores things) or a system of action (you can do things with it). The first is fine. The second is what fundraising leaders actually need.

What the answers tell you

Each question maps to a different remediation:

• Q1 (record completeness) → data-capture forms, append services, lapsed-donor reactivation.
• Q2 (campaign attribution) → workflow change at point of entry, not a tooling rebuild.
• Q3 (duplicates) → matching rules + a quarterly cleanup job, plus a clear preference-centre rule.
• Q4 (stale records) → an archive policy, signed off by the DPO, run on a schedule.
• Q5 (segmentation speed) → a query-saving habit, or training on the existing tool - almost never a new CRM.

What the answers do not tell you

They do not tell you that you need a new CRM. Most charities I work with assume the answer is a migration. In four out of five cases, the existing tool can do what they need; what is missing is workflow, training, or two saved reports.

A CRM you don't fully use is not too small. It is too unfamiliar. New software solves the second problem and creates a third - a six-month implementation gap where nothing improves and a lot of trust is spent.

Run it before you reach for a demo

Five minutes. Five questions. Pin them to your operations agenda. They will tell you, honestly, whether your CRM is the bottleneck - or whether the bottleneck is sitting between the chair and the keyboard.

Either answer is useful. Both save you a quarter of someone's salary.

Further reading

Choosing a Charity CRM in 2026 | Lead-Scoring for Charities, Without the Hype | Donor Segmentation That Actually Moves Money