By Dan Ingle
Charities today have the opportunity to completely change how they deliver services to supporters and users — with the right CRM setup, seamless and efficient service is entirely within reach.
Let’s look at two different ways this can work.
The Traditional Way:
An email comes in.
A team member reads it, replies manually, then creates a record somewhere else — maybe in a spreadsheet, maybe in a separate database. They copy and paste the content of the query, the response, and the resolution, often repeating information across multiple systems. At the end of each month, someone manually counts up the interactions to create a report. It’s time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to errors.
The Smarter Way:
An email arrives and is automatically captured in the CRM system.
Key information from the email is extracted and populated into a new record without manual effort. A clear, step-by-step workflow ensures that every part of the service process is followed. Pre-approved communication templates can be selected — or even applied automatically — so responses are quick, consistent, and appropriate. Every interaction and resolution is recorded in one place, and reports are updated automatically, offering instant insights into service performance.
This isn’t a future possibility — it’s already happening.
Productle recently helped a charity achieve exactly this using Microsoft Dynamics tools, significantly improving their efficiency and service quality.
The same transformation can happen with volunteer management.
Here’s how it often works now:
A prospective volunteer gets in touch.
A staff member manually types their information into a spreadsheet, then asks for additional documents or details, storing everything across different tabs or systems. When the charity needs volunteers, it becomes a mad rush to find the right information, often buried in multiple places.
But there’s a better way:
A prospective volunteer completes a form on the charity’s website.
Their information flows directly into the CRM system. From a single record, staff can easily manage the volunteer’s skills, availability, training, documentation, and participation history.
Need to find volunteers with specific skills? Filter a real-time report. Want to know how many volunteer hours have been contributed and their monetary value? The data is already calculated. Need alerts about expiring training or documents? The system flags them automatically. Staff gain instant access to organized, searchable information — saving hours of work and allowing them to focus on supporting the charity's mission.
Making This a Reality
While these improvements sound powerful, achieving them takes more than just installing a CRM system. True transformation requires:
A careful requirements-gathering process
Mapping out business processes in detail
Thorough testing to ensure the system works reliably
In the examples above, Productle combined Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service tools like Email Queues, Cases, and Business Process Flows — along with custom development — to streamline communication handling.
For volunteer management, we built a bespoke Model-Driven App, used Power Automate to process online form submissions, and designed a custom volunteer management system that fits the charity’s needs.
At Productle we believe the right technology, thoughtfully applied, can unlock incredible efficiencies — and give charities more time to focus on what matters.
