Success Story | A Magical Implementation: Baylor’s Transition from RE NXT to BBCRM

Rashida Brown, Fiona Buttars, Liz Murray and Holly Parrish

August 05, 2025

In 2021, the advancement team at Baylor College of Medicine (Baylor) recognized it had an urgent need to update its systems, processes, and technology to reach its fundraising goals. Following a thorough assessment and system selection process with JCA (see our case study about those projects here), the team decided in 2022 to move forward with implementing Blackbaud CRM (BBCRM) to replace its legacy Raiser’s Edge NXT (RE NXT) system—a move that ran parallel to a Finance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution upgrade.

Implementing new technology solutions, especially complex CRM & ERP systems, require meticulous project management, careful data conversion, and thoughtful business process redesign. Without these, organizations risk project delays, data integrity issues, and difficulty realizing the full potential of their investments. Baylor partnered with JCA to manage the details of the new system’s implementation so they would be able to leverage the systems to work efficiently and effectively towards its goals.

“Baylor wasn’t just implementing a new CRM—they were transforming their entire advancement ecosystem,” said Liz Murray, Director of Professional Services at JCA. “The parallel conversions (BBCRM and SAP) added complexity but also created opportunities for deeper integration and efficiency.”

Kicking Off with a Bit of Magic

In true Baylor fashion, the project launched with a fun, Harry Potter-themed kickoff. Teams took on wizarding world names, setting a collaborative and lighthearted tone for what would become a demanding, high-stakes implementation.

Blackbaud led initial discovery meetings, with JCA’s consultants participating as dedicated client advocates—actively engaging in conversations about system design, data conversion, and process alignment. While Blackbaud focused on the technology, JCA ensured that Baylor’s voice was heard and that their business needs drove the process. JCA focused on three critical areas: project management, business process redesign, and data conversion.

Project Management: Managing a Complex Web of Moving Parts

One of the most critical contributions JCA made to the implementation project was project management. With a small core team on the client side—only three people to start, one of whom left early in the project—Baylor was stretched thin. JCA stepped in to fill the gaps, overseeing multi-dimensional schedules that accounted for JCA deliverables, Blackbaud timelines, client responsibilities, and third-party vendors.

JCA consultants made it a point to support Baylor’s internal project leads, not just with logistics but with workload management and priority-setting. The team checked in regularly, making sure they had what they needed to keep moving forward. JCA also ensured proper communication and project alignment with third-party vendors who provided integrations for document management, online giving, and general ledger posting. With so many parties involved, proactive, transparent project management became essential to success.

Importantly, JCA consultants tailored their approach to Baylor’s culture. Unlike highly structured institutions with rigid swim-lane project teams, Baylor operated more informally—which meant the JCA team needed to adapt their facilitation style to keep momentum without overwhelming the client team. That cultural sensitivity proved essential to driving timely decisions and maintaining engagement.

Business Process Redesign: Tailored to Culture

No CRM implementation is complete without revisiting business processes. JCA worked with the Baylor team to make sure they understood the functionality available in the new system, helping them discover new, more efficient ways of working.

JCA led Baylor through working sessions with nine functional teams, unpacking how they worked, what data they needed, and how the new system could better serve them. Two areas, in particular, that saw meaningful improvements through this redesign process were:

Gift Processing: From Paper to Automated Efficiency. Previously, gift processing relied on paper forms, spreadsheets, and disjointed approvals. This led to slow processing, inconsistent data, and no clear way to track issues. JCA helped Baylor modernize this critical area with a phased approach.

Baylor modernized gift processing by first digitizing approvals, then transitioning to BBCRM’s automation. This eliminated paper workflows, enforced clear rules, and created digital audit trails. As a result, processing time was cut in half, and errors were virtually eliminated. This phased approach brought immediate improvements and built a strong base for long-term efficiency with the new CRM.

Prospect Management: Data-Driven Strategy in BBCRM. Prospect data lived in spreadsheets, emails, and RE NXT notes, with no unified system to understand prospect strategy, prioritize portfolios, or measure staff performance. Recognizing this critical gap, JCA provided strategic direction for a complete overhaul of prospect management.

Baylor transformed prospect management by leveraging BBCRM’s tools to create a structured tracking system. The redesign introduced customizable pipeline stages (Identification to Stewardship), a new research request system, and multi-step donor plans that centralized action steps around a singular strategy for each prospect.

Some of the business processes were even addressed and improved before Baylor’s go-live on BBCRM. “We didn’t wait for the new system to fix broken processes,” said Holly Parrish, Principal Consultant at JCA. “We improved what we could in Baylor’s RE NXT first, then adapted those solutions for BBCRM. It was a ‘crawl, walk, run’ strategy.”

Data Conversion: More Than a Migration

While JCA’s team led business process design workshops, the project team also worked on one of the most critical—and often underestimated—aspects of a CRM implementation: data conversion. This overlapping approach was intentional, allowing the team to identify how data conversion decisions would impact business processes, and vice versa, in real time.

Data conversion is a significant undertaking in any implementation, and with a lean client team, it was essential to have dedicated oversight. While Blackbaud handles the technical engineering of the conversion, it’s the client’s responsibility to ensure the right data makes it over—and to decide what shouldn’t. That’s where JCA stepped in.

JCA supported and guided Baylor’s team in making smart, strategic decisions about their data. JCA led the testing and validation process, using JCA’s proprietary tools to analyze and assess data quality. This allowed JCA to give the Baylor team a big-picture perspective of their data and its quality. The team then made informed decisions about what historical data was truly valuable to bring into the new system and how to structure data to better support their future workflows.

“We started with a giant report of all the data issues in RE,” said Molly McColgan, Director of Gift Operations at Baylor. “Seeing it all in one place was overwhelming, but it forced us to prioritize. Some data simply couldn’t migrate ‘as is’—it had to be cleaned first.”

Once the data was ready for conversion, the JCA team emphasized rigorous testing and validation—beyond the “soft testing” typically recommended by software vendors—to ensure that once live, the system would function seamlessly and reliably with clean, well-structured data.

The outcome was a cleaner, smarter, and more efficient database. A key success was resolving thousands of duplicate records—over 80,000 in total—before migration. Baylor also improved event tracking, ensuring accurate constituent histories and a true 360-degree view of their supporters. In short, this conversion process allowed Baylor to start fresh in their new CRM environment, with data that was not only accurate but truly actionable.

Best Laid Plans

Even with meticulous planning, Baylor faced unexpected challenges, including:

Staffing turnover, such as the unexpected departure of a critical leader midway through the project, created a leadership gap and required swift realignment.

“We learned not to wait too long to staff up and to lean on external partners like JCA when internal capacity was stretched,” said McColgan. “Even the best plans will change—what matters is staying focused on the end goal.”

Integration delays also happened, forcing the team to reassess dependencies and adjust timelines to accommodate technical and operational hurdles.

To maintain momentum, Baylor adopted a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, focusing on core functionalities first and deferring advanced features to later phases. This pragmatic shift ensured progress despite constraints.

McColgan shared another critical lesson: “Define your non-negotiables early. We had to accept that not everything would be perfect at go-live, but we prioritized what mattered most.”

A Smooth Go-Live

Baylor went live with BBCRM in early February 2025, following a structured, collaborative go-live plan developed by JCA. Thanks to diligent project management, business process alignment, end-user training, and careful data conversion oversight, the go-live was remarkably smooth.

The client reported minimal data issues, no significant configuration problems, and strong user adoption. In fact, Baylor acknowledged that without JCA’s guidance, advocacy, and leadership throughout the project, they wouldn’t have achieved the same level of readiness and success.

“Implementing a new CRM and ERP simultaneously was a daunting task,” said Austin Andrews, Senior Director of Data Management & Analytics. “JCA’s project management expertise was invaluable in keeping us on track and navigating the inevitable challenges. Their deep understanding of our data and business processes ensured a smooth transition and ultimately set us up for long-term success.”

Even in the face of post-go-live staffing changes, Baylor remains confident in their system and processes—a testament to the solid foundation laid through this collaborative effort.

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