5 ways to CRM
“CRM” is just shorthand for “keeping track of your people, at scale”. And there's more than one way to skin that cat.
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You've got a mission. And you've got people. Some of those people help you carry out the mission, others benefit from it directly. Some do both.
The best way to keep track of those relationships will vary, depending on your goals, resources, and limitations.
I talk about CiviCRM a lot on this list, but not all my clients use it. Let's examine some options:
Spreadsheets:
Starting with spreadsheets is easy: create a few columns, and start adding rows.
This can work fine in the beginning, especially if there's only a handful of people who need to work with the data, and they don't need much complexity in the tracking.
But as your work grows, it can quickly become very hard to manage.
Should all of your staff have access to view and edit all the data?
Are you just tracking a name and a single email address for each contact? What about the history of event participation, donations, multiple addresses and phone numbers, relationships between contacts, and more?
How will you record all the ways each contact has interacted with your organization, and identify the important next steps for each of them?
You can see that this is the easiest method to start, and one of the hardest to maintain long-term.
Multiple outside services:
Spreadsheets don't provide any features for your contacts to take action on their own.
So you might spin up one or more specific services to provide those features:
Eventbrite for event registration.
MailChimp for mailing list management.
A quick PayPal page for donations.
Google Forms or SurveyMonkey for surveys, volunteer sign-ups, and more.
This approach gives you a fairly cost-effective way to get those features. And the data in each of those systems is in some kind of a structured format, so you could export it to Excel or use the service’s own reporting tools to examine the data.
But it's still hard to get a complete view of any one person's history with your organization.
Which long-time mailing list readers recently donated for the first time?
Which regular volunteers haven't come to a training recently?
Who has attended all your events, but hasn’t yet subscribed to your mailing list?
With your contact data spread out across five different systems, these questions are very hard to answer.
CRM-as-a-service:
There's no shortage of online services who will charge you a small monthly fee to serve as the centralized data store for all your contacts.
Most of them are designed for business and sales, but the nonprofit space has plenty of options: CiviCRM Spark (and other CiviCRM-as-a-service providers), Neon One, NationBuilder, and many more.
These will give you many of the online features you would have gotten from your “multiple outside services,” nicely integrated into a single platform for holistic reporting and analysis.
Not bad, and you might stop there. Unless you need features they don't offer. Then you need something customizable.
Salesforce:
Yep, I'll give this product its own category. It has a lot going for it:
It's incredibly customizable.
It has thousands of available plugins, apps, and integrations.
... plus literally thousands of firms you could hire to build out something with it.
It has a massive marketing machine; almost everyone you know has already heard of it.
It also has two major limitations:
1. Out of the box, it's fairly limited: you get basic CRM features for your staff, and not much more. You'll need paid plugins or custom development if you want:
public facing donation and sign up forms …
targeted features such as for memberships and events …
mailing list management …
… basically, most of the community-organization features you would get from your CRM-as-a-service or even from your “multiple outside services” approach.
2. It has a reputation for being very expensive, both in development cost and in per-user license fees.
So, for an organization with a very large annual budget, a solid business case for custom features, and an aversion to trying anything they haven't already heard of, it can make sense.
Managing your own CiviCRM instance:
Obviously this is the space I work in most. It's not the right choice for many organizations, who will prefer one of the options above.
But it has some pretty compelling benefits:
Solid out-of-the-box features for membership management, online contributions, mailing lists, events, case management, and more.
Literally unlimited customizability, within the bounds of your budget and/or development skills.
Zero licensing fees.
An active and sizable (if not 800-pound-gorilla status) community of developers and service providers.
Gives you complete control of the ownership and privacy of your constituent data.
None of the above options offer all that — and I don’t know any other offering that does.
Of course, this approach also means it’s your system, for better or worse. “Unlimited customizability” does not mean “never needs extra effort or expense.” You’ll eventually want some help from someone with more technical skills than you.
Here's the thing:
None of the above choices are the right answer for every organization. Smart organizations will make an informed decision based on their own needs, goals, and resources.
But more important is this:
In the end, having the fanciest — or simplest, or cheapest, or most well-known — CRM toolset won’t define your success as an organization.
Whether you're running things in six different spreadsheets copied across 15 different laptops, or you're paying $100,000 a year for a system that's the envy of all your ex-bosses, what matters is this:
How are you leveraging that system to build effective relationships … with the people you care about … and the people who want to help you?
All the best,
A.