The Operating Gap Never Really Closes
If your organization runs its fundraising on Salesforce's Nonprofit Success Pack, you've probably had some version of this conversation already this year. The system still works — nobody has told you to turn it off. But it hasn't gained a new feature since March 2023, new organizations joining Salesforce's nonprofit program no longer get it by default, and every vendor and consultant in your inbox has an opinion about when you should migrate.
As Salesforce Ben's 2026 review of the nonprofit product line puts it, the package "is no longer receiving any new features or enhancements."
For a lot of organizations, that CRM has been in place for close to a decade. It was the big project once — someone championed it, a partner implemented it, the team got trained, and then everyone went back to work. That was supposed to be the end of it.
Most of us were taught that change is a project
The way many organizations think about change goes something like this. You figure out what's wrong, you pick a new system or process, you implement it, and then things settle back into normal. There's a budget line, a timeline, a launch date, and ideally a small celebration at the end.
I understand why that model is so appealing. Projects are easy to fund, easy to explain to a board, and easy to hand to a partner. They also give everyone a finish line, which matters a great deal when your team is already stretched.
The trouble is that the finish line is an illusion. The moment you go live, the world you designed the system for starts to drift away from you.
The system didn't break. The distance grew.
Think about what happened to that CRM over ten years. The product changed, and so did your organization: new programs, new staff, new reporting demands from funders, maybe a merger or a new strategic plan. Donor expectations changed too. And through all of it, the way your team used the system mostly stayed where it was on launch day.
So when a vendor finally forces the question, it feels like a technology problem that arrived out of nowhere. I'd describe it differently: the migration isn't really the problem, it's the moment an old problem becomes impossible to ignore.
I've started calling that problem the operating gap. The operating gap is the distance between where an organization wants to go and what its current way of working can reliably support. Every organization has one, and the important thing to understand about it is that it never closes for good. You can narrow it, sometimes dramatically. But as soon as you move forward, the environment moves too, and a new gap opens up in front of you.
That's true even if you never replace a single system. The distance between how you work today and how you could be working keeps growing on its own, because everything around you keeps changing.
Why a better migration won't solve it
The natural response to a forced migration is to run it as another project, and to try to do it better this time. Clean up the data, document the processes, hire a good implementation partner. All of that is worth doing.
But if the organization comes out the other side with the same habits it had going in, you'll be having this same conversation in a few years with a different system.
The research on large technology change backs this up. When BCG surveyed 825 senior executives about their digital transformations in 2020, only 30% of those efforts had fully succeeded. The part I find most useful is what they found about partial efforts: companies that addressed three or four of the six success factors they identified, but not all of them, still tended to fail. Getting the technology right while leaving the people and process questions unanswered doesn't give you partial credit.
That's why I don't think the real question is "should we migrate, and when?" The more useful question is whether anyone in the organization owns the ongoing work of keeping how you operate in step with where you're going. Who knows why your data is shaped the way it is? Who noticed, three years ago, that the team had stopped using half the system? Whose job is it to ask what's changed since last year?
If the honest answer is nobody, that's the gap to work on, and it matters more than which platform you land on.
What managing the gap looks like instead
Managing the operating gap is less dramatic than a transformation project, and much more useful. In practice, it means building a few habits into how the organization runs:
Noticing change as it happens, rather than when a vendor announces an end date. The people closest to your systems usually see it first, so they need a way to raise it.
Deciding what actually matters. Not every new feature or platform shift deserves a response. Your strategy should help you tell the difference.
Adapting people, process and technology together, so a system change comes with the ownership, training and workflow changes it needs.
Doing it again, on purpose and on a regular rhythm, instead of once a decade under pressure.
If your organization is staring down a migration, or just a growing sense that your systems no longer fit the way you work, this is a good season to look at the whole picture before committing to a direction. A Digital Readiness Assessment started this fall wraps up in late winter, which means you'd have a clear set of priorities before spring fundraising and events start deciding what's possible.
And if you're not sure yet whether you're looking at a technology decision or something bigger, a Signal Check is a lighter way to find out. It's $350 and a conversation with me, and I have no stake in which platform you choose, or whether you migrate at all.
The goal isn't to arrive
I think a lot of the exhaustion in this sector comes from the belief that somewhere out there is a finished state: the right system, properly implemented, after which things will finally be calm. I don't believe that state exists anymore, and I don't think organizations should keep spending their energy chasing it.
What you can build is an organization that handles change well, one that expects the gap to reopen and has the people, habits and ownership in place to manage it when it does. That's a far more achievable goal, and it holds up no matter what your vendor announces next.
If this is the kind of thinking that's useful to you, I’d love to hear from you.