When a CRM is not the best tool

It can be tempting to try and make CiviCRM do things it wasn't really built for, or more importantly, to do things that don't fit the way you'll use your CRM.

For example:

• Anymous surveys: You're planning to send a link for this survey to a certain segment of your contacts, but you have good reasons to make it anonymous (maybe you believe that makes it easier to answer sensitive personal questions).

The responses are anonymous, so where would you even store them in a CRM?

The better tool for this is probably a plugin in your CMS (Drupal, WordPress), or an online form service like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.

• Events that don't require fees or registration: You're running a series of "come and go" events in your community — maybe a monthly block party, or frequent bingo games, kareoke night, trivia bowl, etc.

Since these events don't require registration or fees, and you aren't planning to track attendance beyond total numbers, there’s not much for a CRM to do here. The better tool would be a simple static page on your website, or even a more full-featured "event calendar" plugin in your CMS.

Of course if you want, you can use your CRM to create a form where event attendees can voluntarily check-in on their phones, or where survey respondents can sign up to get the survey results.

Those would be smart uses of your CRM, to increase engagement with these folks.

And that — increasing engagement — is where you should be using your CRM.

It's just not for everything.

All the best,
A.