Hey Reader,

It's been a while.

The last time this newsletter landed in your inbox was October. That's five months. And I want to be straight with you about what happened — because "I've been busy" isn't an explanation, and you deserve better than that.

Here's what actually happened. Things accelerated. A 24-month Salesforce engagement launched at a critical moment and needed full attention. A conference session got confirmed. And a set of offers I'd been designing for nonprofits that can't justify a full-scale consulting engagement started taking real shape — workshops, a diagnostic framework, a fractional support model.

On top of that, we've grown to a team of 5, while my daughter is now almost a year and a half! That says enough... I kept telling myself I'd get back to the newsletter when things slowed down.

Things never slow down.

So here I am (celebrating my 30th today in true zillennial fashion - work and play)!

What I've been hearing in the field

While I was heads down with clients, I kept a running log of the questions and patterns that kept coming up across every engagement, every discovery call, every event. I'll be working through that list in this newsletter over the coming months.

One thing that kept surfacing: the people responsible for running CRM and data operations at nonprofits are exhausted and overwhelmed — and a significant number of them are not planning to stay. A 2024 survey by the Social Impact Staff Retention Project found that 67% of nonprofit employees were either actively looking for a new job or planned to start within a year. That number held across roles and organization sizes. It wasn't a staffing crisis headline. It was the quiet background condition of almost every organization I worked with.

The reason I keep coming back to that stat isn't because turnover is the problem. It's because turnover reveals the problem. When the person who knows how your CRM runs, how your donor reports get pulled, and why your intake form works the way it does decides to leave — what they take with them isn't just institutional knowledge. It's operational continuity. And most organizations won't notice it's gone until something breaks.

That's the thing I want to spend time on this year. Not just the tools. The infrastructure underneath the tools and the people operating them.

What's new at Mata Consulting

Here's a quick map of what I've built and what's coming up:

1. We are launching a CRM Diagnostic offering: It's a structured assessment of where your CRM stands right now — data quality, workflow consistency, team adoption, reporting gaps — delivered as a written roadmap with clear priorities. It's designed for organizations that are about to make a significant technology investment and want to make sure they're solving the right problem first.
2. We will host our first ever CRM Roadmap Building Workshop, a two-hour session where your team walks out with an actual roadmap to get you moving on solving your problems right away. I'm running small cohorts — seven seats — so every participant gets real airtime for their specific situation.
3. I'm also presenting at BridgeTECH 2026 in July alongside April Komolmis of Ednovate. Our session is called "What Happens When Fundraisers and CRMs Work as One: The Ednovate Story." More on that in the coming months.

And this newsletter is back on a consistent schedule — last Wednesday of every month, 2:30 PM Pacific. Every issue will have a real story from the field, one thing you can act on, and honest updates on what we're building.

One thing before you go.

I put together a ten-question checklist that tells you where your CRM is working and where it's quietly costing you. Two sections — data integrity and workflow alignment. Takes about three minutes to complete.

Most organizations I work with score somewhere in the middle. Not broken enough to justify a crisis, not clean enough to actually trust the data. That middle range is where the quiet costs live: the donor report nobody pulls because nobody trusts it, the new staff member who learned the system from whoever sat next to them, the program outcomes that live in a spreadsheet because nobody connected them to development.

The checklist tells you which of those gaps you actually have. The score at the bottom points you toward a specific next step depending on where you land.

Download it here: CRM Health Checklist.

If you've been waiting for something worth reading, stay. If this isn't for you, unsubscribe below. No hard feelings either way.

Glad to be back.

Blessings,
​Joe A. Mata III

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​P.S. Guests appearances were made in Chicago and we had a great time getting to know the Association of Christian Fundraisers!