A custom system that replaced a nonprofit's CRM

Situation

The organization's CRM was not designed around the way it works with churches. Orders for its training materials sat in an online store and a payment processor, where a church appeared only as scattered buyer email addresses. Questions about revenue, subscriptions or a church's history meant exporting files and working through them by hand, and the monthly bookkeeping required several exports and manual sorting.

Solution

A custom web application replaced the CRM and brings this information together around each church.

• Church records from orders. Each church page shows its orders, subscription status, purchase history, contacts and notes.
• Questions in plain English. An AI chat answers questions about the sales data. It can only read the data, and revenue totals come from a checked calculation.
• Church research. AI read nearly every customer church's website and collected facts such as its ministries, each stored with the page and sentence it came from.
• Follow-up emails. Rules read each church's order history and determine whether it is reviewing the material, trying it with a group or launching it. A follow-up is timed to match, and the AI drafts the email.
• Bookkeeping. Each payment processor payout becomes one balanced journal entry, split into products, shipping, sales tax and donations.

Design decisions

The follow-up rules came from Jeff Hunt's close reading of years of the organization's order history. Only a person creates a church record, and a person always sends the follow-up emails from their own account. Journal entries reach the accounting system only when someone imports them.

Outcome

The custom system replaced the organization's CRM. The team sees each church's full history on one page and asks questions about sales without exporting files. The monthly bookkeeping entries are drafted from the payouts, ready for a person to import, and every entry produced on live data balanced to the penny.