Miramichi Community Foundation

The foundation has a strong programmatic strategy and a board that understands its community role, but there is no digital roadmap connecting that mission to the systems meant to serve it. Technology decisions are made reactively, one grant deliverable at a time, which is how the organization ended up with a donor CRM, a separate email tool, and a spreadsheet grant tracker that were never chosen to work together. No single person owns digital across the organization, and the board reviews technology only when something breaks or a renewal invoice arrives. There is no multi-year view of what the systems should become, and no line in the strategic plan that treats digital capability as a fundable initiative rather than an overhead cost to be minimized.

Reactive buying locks the foundation into tools that do not integrate, raising long-run cost and staff effort. Without a plan, the organization cannot sequence fixes or make a fundable case for them, so genuinely eligible grant money goes unclaimed.

A two-year digital roadmap owned at the board level, tied to mission outcomes, with each phase mapped to a specific funding source and a named internal owner.

• Low Add a standing digital agenda item to quarterly board meetings and assign a single internal digital owner. Within 1 month
• Medium Draft a two-year digital roadmap that sequences the CRM, reporting, and consent fixes against IRAP and provincial funding windows. 1 to 3 months

This is the foundation's weakest axis and its most urgent. Program outcomes, grant deliverables, and donor giving history are held in separate places, and none of them can produce a report without manual assembly. Grant management runs in a shared spreadsheet with a tab per funder, so restricted-fund tracking depends on one person's memory of a colour code. The donor CRM holds giving totals but is not reconciled against the payment processor, so the numbers rarely match on the first pass. There is no baseline against which program impact is measured, which means the outcome reporting that funders increasingly demand is rebuilt from scratch each cycle. When a department asks for a dashboard, the answer is several evenings of a senior staffer's time copying figures between systems.

Manual reporting consumes scarce senior-staff hours every cycle and still produces numbers no one fully trusts. Two funders now require outcome dashboards the current process cannot generate, turning a data gap into a direct lost-grant risk.

A single reporting spine that reconciles donations, grants, and program outcomes, able to produce a funder-ready dashboard on demand with defensible restricted-fund tracking.

• Medium Define a core set of outcome metrics with baselines for the two programs facing the nearest funder deadlines. 1 to 3 months
• Medium Replace the grant-tracking spreadsheet with structured grant records inside the CRM and reconcile them monthly against the processor. 3 to 6 months

The technology footprint is a set of capable products that do not connect. The donor CRM, the email platform, the online donation form, and the accounting package each hold a slice of the same relationships, and staff move data between them by export and re-import. There is no integration layer, so the mailing list and the CRM contact record drift apart within a quarter. Much of what would close these gaps is available to the foundation at deep discount or no cost through TechSoup Canada, which validated charities can access but this organization has barely used. Accounts are shared, password hygiene is informal, and there is no inventory of which tool holds which data, which is a quiet risk given that donor records include sensitive personal and financial information.

Export-and-reimport work is slow and error-prone, and drifting lists undermine both fundraising and CASL compliance. Paying full price, or paying in staff time, for capability the sector offers cheaply is avoidable spend the foundation cannot afford.

An integrated core stack, sourced through TechSoup where possible, with the CRM as the system of record and automated sync to email, donations, and accounting.

• Low Complete TechSoup Canada validation and audit eligibility for discounted or donated licences across the current stack. Within 1 month
• High Establish the donor CRM as the single system of record and connect the email and donation tools to it. 3 to 6 months

People and Culture is the strongest axis and the reason the organization functions despite its systems. Staff and long-serving volunteers hold deep knowledge of donors, programs, and the community, and there is genuine willingness to adopt better tools when they are shown a clear reason and a path. The risk is not resistance but concentration. Critical knowledge lives in individual heads and personal inboxes rather than in shared systems, so a single departure would take institutional memory with it. Training is informal and ad hoc, and no one on the team has a defined remit for digital capability, so improvements depend on whoever has spare evening hours. The culture is an asset to build on, but it is currently compensating for infrastructure rather than being amplified by it.

Knowledge held in individuals rather than systems makes the foundation fragile to turnover, and every hour senior staff spend on manual workarounds is an hour not spent on mission. The goodwill to change exists but is being spent on firefighting.

Institutional knowledge captured in shared systems, with a named digital owner and light-touch training so the team's capability compounds rather than walks out the door.

• Low Designate a digital champion with protected time and move key donor and grant notes out of personal inboxes into the CRM. 1 to 3 months
• Low Run short role-based training as new tools are adopted, focused on the two or three tasks each role does most. 3 to 6 months

Core processes work but are undocumented and personality-dependent. Donation receipting, grant reporting, and volunteer scheduling each follow a routine that lives in the head of the person who usually does it, with no written procedure to fall back on when they are away. Receipts are issued and reconciled by hand, which is where CRA-relevant errors creep in. Volunteer coordination runs on email threads and a sign-up sheet, so double-bookings and no-shows are managed reactively. Because the steps are not written down, there is no way to see where the time goes or to automate the repetitive parts. The organization is efficient at the level of individual effort and inefficient at the level of the system, which is a hard problem to see from the inside.

Undocumented, manual processes are slow, hard to hand off, and prone to the receipting errors that put charitable status at risk. When a key person is away, routine work stalls, and no process can be improved because none is visible.

Documented, mostly automated core workflows for receipting, grant reporting, and volunteer scheduling, resilient to any one person being unavailable.

• Low Document the receipting and grant-reporting workflows step by step and store them where the whole team can reach them. Within 1 month
• Medium Automate donation receipts and volunteer scheduling using the CRM and a scheduling tool sourced through TechSoup. 3 to 6 months

The foundation knows its donors and community well, and relationships are genuinely strong. What is thin is the governance and consent infrastructure around those relationships. CASL requires provable consent for every fundraising email, but consent is scattered across a CRM field, an email-platform status, and old paper forms, so the organization cannot produce a clean consent record on request. Donor privacy, framed by PIPEDA, is handled with good intentions but no policy, and sensitive giving data sits in spreadsheets outside any access control. The board governs the donor relationship from quarterly summaries assembled by hand, without a live view of retention, lapsed donors, or restricted-fund balances. The relationships are excellent; the accountability wrapper around them has not kept pace.

An unprovable consent trail is a live CASL exposure, and uncontrolled donor data is a privacy risk to the institution's reputation. Governing from hand-built summaries means the board sees donor health late, when a lapsed-giving trend is already entrenched.

A single, auditable consent and donor record with a clear privacy policy, feeding a board-level dashboard of retention, lapsed donors, and fund balances.

• Low Consolidate consent status into one CRM field and adopt a short written donor-privacy policy aligned to CASL and PIPEDA. 1 to 3 months
• Medium Build a board-facing donor and fund dashboard drawn directly from the CRM rather than assembled by hand. 3 to 6 months