Christine Gomez
Senior Consultant
Robin Balfanz
Consultant
Selecting a new fundraising CRM or nonprofit technology platform is more than just an IT upgrade; it is one of the most consequential strategic decisions your organization will make. This process shapes how your team operates, how your data is managed, and how effectively you can deliver on your mission for years to come.
Despite the stakes, many organizations stumble before the first vendor demo even begins by assembling the wrong core leadership team.
To protect your investment and ensure the platform meets your long-term needs, you must curate a core team with intention. The core team should be comprised of people with the authority, functional knowledge, and, most importantly, the strategic mindset to elevate the organization. Not only does getting the core team composition right at the outset protect your investment, it significantly increases the likelihood that the platform you choose will actually meet your organization’s long-term needs.
The Right Size for a System Selection Core Team
There is a temptation to make the core team as inclusive as possible. Broader representation feels democratic. But this team is a decision-making body, and decision-making bodies need to be small enough to function.
We recommend three to five people for a system selection core team. Fewer than three and you risk blind spots in functional knowledge. More than five and scheduling becomes a logistical burden and consensus becomes harder to reach.
The goal is to include the people who are best positioned to define what the organization truly needs and evaluate the options objectively, leading to a final recommendation that they can stand behind.
Who Should Be on the System Selection Core Team
The specific composition of your core team will vary based on the size and structure of your organization, but several roles are consistently essential.
The Project Lead
The project lead is typically the most senior person responsible for the data and technology function—whether that sits within development, advancement operations, or an IT department. This person owns the project internally, drives accountability, and serves as the primary liaison throughout the process. In smaller organizations, this role may overlap with the executive director or director of development.
What matters most is that the project lead has both the organizational authority to make things happen and the operational familiarity to understand what “working” actually looks like.
The Organizer
The project manager turns a mess of logistics into an artful masterpiece. This person keeps the team and project on track by managing the timeline, tracking action items, and fitting calendars together like Tetris pieces.
The Frequent User
Representation from key functional areas is equally important. The core team should encompass leadership from the areas that interact most directly with the platform daily. This often includes gift processing and financial reconciliation, fundraising and portfolio or prospect management, and anyone who oversees significant data sets and functionality (e.g., membership, ticketing, events) in the current platform.
The Information Security Guard
The role of IT and information security depends heavily on how your organization is structured. In some cases, your IT team may need to be involved from the beginning—particularly if platform security, data hosting, and systems integration are central to the decision.
In other cases, IT’s most meaningful contribution happens later in the process, when evaluating finalists and reviewing contract terms. Neither approach is wrong, but it is worth defining IT’s role intentionally rather than assuming it.
The Executive Director or CEO
The executive director or CEO is typically a stakeholder rather than a core team member. Their job is to provide strategic direction on priorities and budget and ultimately sign off on the final recommendation.
Expecting an executive director to attend every bi-weekly project check-in is unrealistic and often unnecessary. What matters is that they are engaged at the moments that count: kickoff, prioritization of requirements, and final.
The Difference Between Core Team Members and Subject Matter Experts
One question that comes up often is whether end users—the staff members who are in the system every day—should have a seat on the core team.
The answer is: no (excluding the frequent user representative), but absolutely in the process.
The primary goal of a system selection is not to evaluate which platform is most familiar or most comfortable. It is to define what your organization needs to advance its mission and then identify which platform is best positioned to deliver that. That requires leadership-level perspective on organizational priorities, not just operational familiarity with current workflows.
That said, the knowledge that your most experienced end users carry is genuinely valuable. At Benefactor Group, we build structured opportunities for that input throughout the process through individual and group discovery interviews and by opening vendor demos to a broader audience so that staff can observe, provide feedback through their leaders, and feel appropriately included in a decision that will affect their daily work. This kind of intentional inclusion matters for staff buy-in as the organization moves toward implementation.
Don’t Forget About Bandwidth
Projects of this magnitude take a significant amount of time so you must take into consideration core team members’ workloads. Day-to-day responsibilities do not disappear. Remember that after the system selection comes the implementation so it is vital that you do not burn out core team members. Ways to address include adjusting who sits on the core team to those with more bandwidth, moving responsibilities to other staff members, or finding partners like Benefactor Group to help bridge the gap.
One Often-Overlooked Consideration: Conflict of Interest
System selections involve significant financial commitments and ongoing vendor relationships. Organizations should be thoughtful about whether any member of the core team—or key stakeholders with influence over the process or final decision—has a personal or professional relationship with one of the platforms being evaluated.
This does not mean automatically disqualifying anyone with a prior connection. But it does mean naming it, being transparent about it, and taking appropriate steps to ensure the process remains objective.
One of the meaningful advantages of engaging an outside consultant to facilitate a system selection is that the process is structured around requirements first rather than vendor preferences. That requirements-first framework provides a layer of objectivity that protects the organization and the integrity of the final decision.
Why Getting This Right Matters
The investment in a system selection is real: consulting fees, staff time, vendor demos, RFP processes. Organizations that treat core team composition as an afterthought often discover too late that the team lacked the authority to make decisions, the functional representation to define requirements accurately, or the organizational alignment to move the process forward efficiently.
Getting the team right at the beginning is not an administrative detail. It is the single most important factor in whether your system selection produces a platform decision you can have confidence in and a process your organization can sustain through to implementation.
If you’re approaching a system selection and want guidance on how to structure your team and process, we’d welcome the conversation. Reach out to Benefactor Group to learn how we support nonprofit organizations through every stage of the selection process.
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