Master Class: Managing a CRM Migration without Sacrificing Fundraising Outcomes

If you’ve ever been in the middle of a major technology transformation like a CRM migration, you know the instinct well. Freeze the non-essentials. Minimize change wherever possible. Get the new system live, get the team stabilized, and then revisit the innovation backlog. 

The problem with this approach? Your donors aren’t on the same timeline.

Donor expectations don’t pause during your implementation phase. They keep climbing—shaped by every seamless online shopping checkout, every tap-to-pay transaction, every time another nonprofit delivers an effortless giving experience. By the time many institutions come out the other side of a CRM transition, the gap between what donors experience elsewhere and what they experience on your giving form has only grown wider.

Philip Garland, Associate Vice President of Advancement at the University of San Diego, faced exactly that tension when his institution began migrating to Salesforce. His online giving tech stack was in dire need of an update, but making these changes while in the middle of a CRM migration was daunting. However, Philip decided to take the plunge and move all online giving to GiveCampus. 

This Master Class explores how the USD team pulled it off.

Meet USD

The University of San Diego is a private, independent Catholic university with approximately 5,800 undergraduate students and 85,000 alumni. It’s also, for the past two years, a school that has navigated a full CRM migration to Salesforce while simultaneously modernizing its entire online giving experience—and lived to tell the tale! 

A Setup Many Shops Know Too Well

When Philip and his team began planning their Salesforce implementation (via Affinaquest), the USD giving stack looked like what you’d find at a lot of institutions: one platform for online giving forms, a separate tool for Giving Day, events managed elsewhere, and manual gift entry connecting it all. It worked, but it had stopped serving their donors well—and that tension was becoming impossible to ignore.

The Problem With Waiting

The friction between donor expectations and what USD could deliver was building. 

Donors who wanted to modify a recurring gift had to call the office. Staff would then cancel the existing gift manually and set up a new one—sometimes over the phone, requesting donors read their credit card number to them. There were no digital wallet options: no Apple Pay, no Google Pay, no Venmo. The Giving Day experience ran through a separate Cashnet storefront that looked and felt nothing like the rest of USD’s giving forms. And behind the scenes, there were more than 150 giving forms in the system, many of them outdated, ungoverned, and quietly pointing to dead ends across the USD website.

The moment that made the need for a change undeniable: a donor called Philip to say he could make a gift to the Humane Society in thirty seconds—but couldn’t figure out how to give to USD.

The team knew modernization was essential. The question was whether to act now or wait until the CRM was stable.

The Case for Moving Now

Three things tipped the decision.

1. Donor expectations weren’t going to pause. The gap between the giving experience donors expected and the one USD was delivering was real—and every month of delay made it wider.

2. Fundraising goals were going up, not down. Standing still wasn’t a neutral position. It was falling behind.

3. Fragmentation had become its own cost. Running separate tools for online giving, Giving Day, and events meant separate reporting, separate data flows, and separate staff learning curves. Getting everything onto one platform wasn’t just a donor experience upgrade—it was an operational one.

Many advancement shops describe themselves as donor-centric but make administrator-centric decisions when change feels risky. For USD, making the leap was about holding themselves accountable to their donor-centric values. 

The Execution: How They Actually Did It

After signing the contract with GiveCampus, USD followed a series of key migration milestones that ran alongside the CRM implementation.

1. Align the team and build a sense of safety

Philip didn’t announce the decision and move on. He brought his Director of Annual Giving into the process early, worked through her concerns, and built in a 12-month window where the legacy system would remain available as a fallback. Nobody was going to lose their job if something wasn’t perfect on day one. That psychological safety mattered more than any project plan.

2. Migrate recurring donors

Before shutting down the old system, the team built a full inventory of every active recurring gift, mapped by the next payment date. Their donor relations team reached out personally about a week before each gift was set to expire—giving donors the chance to transition, update their payment information, and in some cases, upgrade their gift. The result: roughly 75 percent retention, with a handful of upgrades that wouldn’t have happened without the personal touchpoint.

3. Audit the form library

One hundred and fifty-plus forms is a lot to untangle. Rather than evaluating forms one by one, Philip’s team approached it from the designation side—identifying which gift designations had actually received gifts over the past three to four years and building the new form library around those. Active designations were loaded into the system, with less common ones available via a hidden-but-searchable field on their main giving form. No more form for every club and department. Just one clean, flexible structure. From there, a governance policy was created: any new form or custom link had to route through the annual giving office, and appeal codes were required. 

4. Clean up their web presence

Legacy giving links were scattered across the USD website, embedded in old emails, and buried in PDFs. The team partnered with central IT to run a full link audit—scanning for the URL patterns that would surface giving form links and replacing them before the new giving platform go-live date. What they found surprised them. Some of those forms had been sitting there, untracked, for years.

5. Streamline reconciliation

With all online giving flowing through a single platform and a single payment channel, reporting cleaned up considerably. Tax receipts moved to email confirmations, no more printing, no more postage, no more manual fulfillment for advancement services. Donors making online gifts expect a digital receipt just like they would with an online shopping experience. Now they get one. 

The Pivot They Didn’t Plan For

Mid-transition, USD had also been working on events. Their original plan was to build within a Salesforce-native tool. That plan did not go well. 

“It was a disaster,” Philip said. The tool wasn’t ready for what his alumni relations partners needed, and the pressure from across campus was mounting. He went back to finance, acknowledged the sunk cost, and made the case to move to GC Events instead.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions of the transition.

For USD’s athletics programs, the integrated giving option offered flexibility: event revenue could flow to the event account, or be directed to the annual fund, depending on the organizer’s goals.

There was one more payoff Philip hadn’t fully anticipated: automated CASE Alumni Engagement scoring. Event registration and check-in data through GiveCampus now flows directly into their engagement reporting—no manual reconciliation, no spreadsheet exports. Their alumni engagement team gets accurate, real-time data. It became a selling point across campus for getting other departments onto the same platform.

The Results 

Two years in and the results of these simultaneous transitions are here. 

On their first Giving Day after launching GC Online Giving, more than 60 percent of transactions came through a digital wallet. Donors used Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, Apple Pay —whatever they wanted. The experience was consistent whether someone was making a recurring gift, a one-time gift, or registering for an event and giving in the same transaction.

The team also noticed a stark drop in the form abandonment notices they received. Donors were finishing what they started. This wasn’t a coincidence. GC Online Giving forms are built around a simple principle: get out of the way of the gift. Removing required fields and text inputs can drive a +16.8 percentage point increase in conversion, translating to 168 more donors per 1,000 page visits. That could add up to $67,200 in additional revenue, assuming an average gift of $400.

Recurring gift management shifted from a manual process for advancement services to donor self-service. Donors get a reminder before their gift processes, can log in and modify it themselves, and no longer have to navigate a cancellation-and-restart cycle to make a change. 

GiveCampus’s auto-updater technology keeps recurring gifts on track by automatically updating donors’ credit card details—like new card numbers or billing zip codes—behind the scenes. The result: fewer failed transactions, uninterrupted giving, and millions of dollars in recurring donations preserved that might have otherwise been lost.

What to Take Back to Your Team

Every advancement shop is different, but USD’s experience holds a few lessons that translate across institutions transitioning to new fundraising solutions while in the midst of a CRM migration: 

• Audit before you migrate. Forms, links, and recurring gifts all need a plan before you flip the switch. Front-loading that work prevents the firefighting later.
• Make change feel safe for your team. Involve people in the decision. Keep a fallback where you can. Imperfect on day one is recoverable. Resistant teams are much harder.
• Use “donor-centric” as a decision filter, not a description. When the instinct is to wait, ask what that waiting costs the donor. That’s often the clearest path to the right call.
• The transition moment is your best shot at governance. Forms, appeal codes, link ownership—these are much easier to standardize during a transition than to fix after everyone’s settled back in.
• Be willing to pivot mid-stream. USD’s events story is proof that some of the best outcomes come from decisions that weren’t in the original plan.
• The cost of waiting doesn’t show up on a report. Abandoned forms, frustrated recurring donors, missed giving opportunities—they’re real losses. They’re just quiet ones.

Closing: USD Took the Leap, Now it’s Your Turn

Philip’s advice to anyone still holding off: “Just do it.” 

Your donors and your institution deserve a modern giving experience, and getting there will require some risk. But, the risk of waiting is just as real—it’s just harder to measure until you’re already behind.

The right conditions for change will never be here. At some point you need to just take the leap. 

If USD’s story sparked something for your team, we’d love to help you think through your own transition. GiveCampus offers modern solutions for every stage of the fundraising life cycle—from everyday online giving to major gifts. 

Connect with a GiveCampus fundraising expert to talk through what modernizing your giving experience could look like—before, during, or after your CRM migration.