Whatever type of customer-relationship management system charities use, the biggest challenge is convincing staff to use it properly, delegates at the Charity Technology Conference heard this week.

Daniel Probert, head of IT innovation at Camfed, said: “We don’t just use our CRM do fundraising, we deliver our entire programme through it. The finance system is about to be 100 per cent integrated with Salesforce. The only challenge is getting people to use it.”

Panellists discussing the pros and cons of different approaches to CRM and a common issue is the problem of user adoption.

Kirsty Neal, data analyst at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “Raiser’s Edge is used mostly by the fundraising team. There are other teams that should be using it, but they’re not as much as they should.”

She added that as well as convincing people to use the CRM it was important to get people to record information in the same way and that at Breakthrough Breast Cancer the IT team had done “quite lot of work to try and standardise it.”

She cautioned against having a bespoke CRM system because at a previous employer “we had terrible trouble hiring staff”. She said: “There was nobody who knew how the system worked so we had to spend a couple of months training new people and getting a temp in was very difficult to do.”

Thomas Muirhead, managing director at Kenyan Orphan Project, added that it was important to be able to keep building on what the CRM system can do.

He said: “The era where you buy something, use it for three years and then buy something else is gone.”

Arguing the case for open source solutions, such as CiviCRM he said that there was less chance of a “community of hundreds of thousands of people” disappearing than one company.

“In the CMS world open source seems to have won the battle with Drupal and Wordpress are leading the way. CRM needs to catch up,” he added.