Preparing for Process Change

You're about to start on your journey through Virtuous (hooray!), which means you'll start using new software and doing some work differently, ultimately leading to potential impact on your processes surrounding that work. Preparing for process change begins with recognizing which processes might change and how they might change. Let's look into some key questions to ask yourself to determine where those changes could be. 

Gift Processing

1. Where and how do you key in gifts?
2. What is the journey for your gifts, and how many platforms does each one go through now? How might using Virtuous impact this flow?
3. Have you coordinated with your data entry and/or finance team(s) to ensure all needs are met?
4. Is there any coding that is important to you during gift entry?
5. Have you created a process for manual gift entry during the few weeks you may be accepting gifts in your legacy system post final migration?

Here you can access our gift processing video series and you will also have a full gift processing instructor led training to help give you more insight as you think through this process.

Receipting

1. How often do you send receipts to your donors? 
2. Do certain gifts get different versions of receipts?
3. Is receipting currently offered through other platforms/sources (e.g., a mailing house)? Why? How could using Virtuous impact this?
4. How are you tracking when donors are given their receipts?

We delivered a full webinar on all things receipting that you can watch here to help give you more insight as you think through this process.

Data Cleanup

As part of your Virtuous migration, our data team helps migrate your existing data from your current CRM; however, we do NOT perform any de-duplicating or data clean up. As we prepare for your migration, make sure you work through cleaning your existing data or are comfortable with the way it is for migration. Alternatively, you can use our data health tool post migration to de-duplicate some contact records. If you are able to do some of that work pre-migration, it does make it easier when we get to the migration portion of your onboarding.

If you would like help with data cleanup, reach out to your onboarding specialist and we'd be happy to introduce you to one of our Virtuous partners who specializes in this.

Think About Your "Before/After" Structures

Virtuous will migrate your data in the structures they have lived in historically. The goal of the migration is to allow you to report on historical data, but moving forward after the migration, you will most likely change the way you set up those structures in Virtuous.

Think about how you will want to change certain ways you track campaigns and projects post migration and in the future with Virtuous. We have a full campaigns training that will cover how Virtuous campaigns are set up to help give you guidance as you think through this change and you can review our "What are campaigns?" article here.

Staffing Changes

1. How will you ensure that all current staff members using Virtuous receive the training they need? 
2. How will you ensure that all future staff members using Virtuous receive the training they need?

In either case, we suggest saving all of your instructor-led training recordings to a new hire folder that new team members can work through and current team members can review as needed.

User Permissions

1. How many "power" users do you have and who will they be?
   • These will be your admin users.
2. What types of permissions do you want to set up in your final database to accommodate various roles and users in Virtuous?

We suggest having at least a few admin users in case one is out of office and your team needs admin help. We also have a full admin training to help guide you through setting up user permissions and you can review our help article on user permissions here.

Post Migration Steps

1. Who manages any platforms that integrate with Virtuous? 
2. Who will manage your data health (i.e., de-duplicating contact records, merging records, etc.)? 
3. If you are going to set up Virtuous Giving or RaiseDonors, do you have a plan to manually import gifts you receive between the time your final database is complete and Virtuous Giving or RaiseDonors is integrated?

Summary

These are a few key things that you will want to think about and plan for as you make the switch to Virtuous. As always, the Virtuous is team is here for you if you would like further assistance with this process - just reach out to your onboarding specialist!