Why a CRM for Not for Profits?

A charity’s supporters are its most valuable asset and knowing how they engage and what their feelings towards an organisation are is crucial knowledge to be in full possession of, says Martin Schwall of consulting group GO1.

So what is a CRM and how can it help with supporter engagement? A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM for short) enables an organisation to organise contacts, constituents or customers (The ‘C’ rather depends on the sector and the platform) and record an organisation’s interactions with them.

These interactions can be from a wide variety of common tasks a Not for Profit may perform on a regular basis, such as donations, memberships, event registrations and day to today interactions such as phone calls, meetings and emails sent. Most CRM tools will also come bundled with a bunch of other helpful features such as email bulk mailing, social media monitoring, reports, surveys and many more useful tools.

Utilising a CRM to help manage an organisation’s data and having an easily accessible, flexible, searchable and reportable repository for it should free up the time spent on administration tasks and searching for pieces of information spread across an organisation in many disparate locations and formats.

This new-found spare time can be spent on undertaking an organisation’s programs, aims and goals instead.

There are many options open to organisations from commercial products such as SalesForce to Open Source (community contributed software) such as CiviCRM.

All these options can be fully integrated into an organisation’s website(s), allowing for visitors to make donations, become members, register for an event or update their own details, without staff needing to undertake manual data entry.

Again, this will not only free up time for more important tasks, but by lowering the barriers for potential supporters to engage, it’s likely to increase donor and membership rates.

Aside from gaining new supporters, a CRM tool can also help to analyse, engage and retain existing supporters better.

By knowing who responds most to email correspondence, or mentions an organisation positively on social media, or attends events regularly can build a comprehensive record of supporters that will survive staff changes and prevent silos of information.

A CRM also makes it easier to segment supporters into lists such as geographic, interest or activity based and target communications more precisely and appropriately.

Who is Go1?

GO1 provides a full range of professional services for Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud implementation and integration including. CRM Consulting, Salesforce and Civi CRM Implementation.

GO1 consultants provide onsite professional services. We do have a passion to learn and understand an organisation and its objectives to successfully define a strategy to deploy and manage a CRM. We then implement the most adapted solution from start to finish ensuring that it’s optimised to an organisation’s needs and objectives.

Contact: Martin Schwall 0434 058 950 or martin@go1.com.au