15 years of sheepCRM
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What we’ve learned building a CRM for membership organisations
sheepCRM started as a volunteer database project for a charity called Adventure Plus in the summer of 2011. Adventure Plus is still a customer today. That continuity is not accidental as it reflects something about how we think the relationship between a software product and the organisations it serves should work.
Why we did not build on Salesforce
The instinct in 2011 was to use Salesforce. It was the market leader, it was growing fast, and it would technically do the job. The problem was that everything in it was built around sales funnels and lead conversion, with language, workflows and assumptions all aimed at closing deals rather than maintaining long-term relationships with members.
You see, membership is a different problem entirely. The core question is not “what is in the pipeline?” but “who are our members, how engaged are they, and how do we serve them better?”. A system built around one of those questions will always feel slightly wrong when applied to the other, and that often compounds over time in ways that are hard to name but easy to feel.
So we built something designed from the start around membership as the primary relationship: recurring payments, renewal cycles, and the kind of history thatprofessional associations actually hold; a decade of events, committees, and communications per contact.
Why we chose to be narrow rather than broad
For the first few years, sheepCRM could have been used by almost anyone who needed a database. One early user summed it up as “Access in the cloud,” which was both accurate and slightly deflating. This is because that flexibility felt like a strength at the time, but in practice it meant spreading effort thinly across many use cases rather than going deep on the specific things membership organisations actually needed.
Our decision to hone in on what we do came from listening rather than strategy. A series of membership organisations found us, each arriving with the same requirements: structured member records, subscription billing, multi-year engagement histories, committee management. We could either stay broad or go deep on membership, and we chose depth.
Over time we narrowed further still, towards professional associations specifically, where accreditation processes, nuanced membership categories, and complex renewal structures are the norm, rather than the exception.
Building for them well means those concepts are already in the system when a new association arrives, rather than something they have to configure from scratch or bolt on later.
What 15 years of customer conversations has actually taught us
The most important thing we have learned over 15 years is about the gap between where organisations think their data is and where it actually is. Associations regularly come to us wanting shiny new dashboards, predictive analytics and very complex automation, and when we look at what they are working with we often find duplicates, inconsistent member record, and information fragmented across several systems.
Our work now starts with foundational questions: can you reliably tell us how many members you have, by type, on any given day, and can you trace a member’s full history in one place? Until the answer to both is yes, advanced reporting layers are unlikely to help.
The organisations that get the most out of sheepCRM are the ones willing to do the work of the basics first: clean data, clear membership definitions, consistent processes, because a small association with 1,000 members can gain as much from that clarity as an association body with 80,000.
Where we are now
The merger with Authentic Digital in 2019 brought a bigger team and experiences in Sales, Marketing and Operations that has changed the scale of what we could do, and today there are ten of us serving just over a hundred organisations, from professional bodies with close to a hundred thousand members down to to smaller associations with a round a thousand. The technical decisions made in 2011: cloud hosting on AWS, flexible data storage, a separata API layer still underpin the proven platform, and the reason we have been able to modernise sheepCRM over fifteen years without rebuilding it from scratch.
The very foundation of what we do is still the same: helping membership organisations answer basic questions reliably, reduce the admin load on small teams, and spend more time on their members than on their systems.
If you’re new here and would like to know more about sheepCRM can help you, book a call with one of our experts today!
FAQ
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No. sheepCRM serves organisations ranging from a few hundred members up to close to a hundred thousand. The foundations that matter most: clean data, clear membership definitions, consistent renewal processes. are just as valuable for a smaller association as a larger one, and the system is designed to grow alongside you rather than require a costly upgrade when you do.
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That depends on how much daily friction your team is absorbing. If staff are spending significant time fighting the system, reconciling data across multiple tools, or manually compensating for gaps in automation, the cost of staying is higher than it appears on the software line. The more membership-specific your requirements: renewals, committees, complex member grades, the more a purpose-built system will change the day-to-day experience.
