"The website should allow for future CRM integration." That sentence appears in almost every charity website brief we read. It almost always means the same thing: the CRM has not been chosen, and nobody wants the website to make the choice harder. Which is a reasonable thing to want, and easy to get wrong.
This article covers three things. What integration actually means. How to keep the door open when you have not chosen. And the questions that separate real integration from a logo on a partners page.
What "integration" actually means
When a donation or a sign-up happens on your website, the details need to reach the place where you manage supporter relationships. Integration is just that data flow, and it comes in three grades:
- Native: the CRM has a WordPress plugin or direct connection to your forms. Data flows automatically, including the donation details that matter for Gift Aid.
- Connected: the systems talk through webhooks or a middleware service such as Zapier or Make. It works well and costs a small monthly fee and occasional attention.
- Manual: someone exports a spreadsheet from the website and imports it into the CRM. Everyone starts here, and it is fine at small scale, as long as it is a chosen routine rather than an accident.
All three are legitimate. Problems come from believing you have the first when you actually have the third.
If you have not chosen a CRM yet
Do not let the website wait for the CRM decision, and do not let the website foreclose it. The website's job is to produce clean, portable data that any future CRM can ingest:
- Consistent fields across all forms: the same name, email and consent questions asked the same way everywhere. Sprawling inconsistent forms are the enemy here; we wrote about that in how many donation forms your charity actually needs.
- Everything exportable as CSV. It is the format every CRM on earth imports.
- Consent recorded with wording and date. Your future CRM will ask.
- No lock-in to a form vendor that holds your data hostage on cancellation.
Build that way and the CRM decision can happen on its own timetable, with a clean import waiting for it.
The UK charity shortlist
For most UK charities the realistic shortlist has four names. Donorfy and Beacon are built for UK charities, handle Gift Aid properly, and connect well to websites. Salesforce with its nonprofit pack is powerful and heavier; it works best when someone owns it internally. CiviCRM is open source and licence-free, best when you have technical support you trust. There are others, but a shortlist of two UK-natives, one heavyweight and one open-source covers how the real decisions go.
The right choice depends on your team more than your ambitions. The best CRM is the one your staff will actually keep updated.
Questions that expose the gap
Whether you are choosing a CRM or briefing a website supplier, these five questions do the work:
- When someone donates on the website, how exactly does their record appear in the CRM?
- Does the Gift Aid declaration travel with the donation?
- What happens to regular giving: does the CRM see every payment, or only the sign-up?
- If we leave this CRM in three years, what do we export and in what format?
- Which parts of this are native, which go through middleware, and which are manual?
If you are writing these requirements into a tender, our guide to running a website tender covers how to ask so that suppliers answer precisely. "Name your CRM, or say honestly that you are undecided" is better than "provision for future integration" in every brief we have ever read.
If you are mid-decision, book a free 20-minute call. We do not sell CRMs, which makes us useful company for choosing one. We will tell you what your website needs to do for each candidate, and what each claim of "integration" really means.
