Most people working in the non-profit sector would love it if their organization could do more with its existing staff and volunteer resources. We often care passionately about the work we do, but lament the wasteful ways we have to do things. Wasted hours, wasted money, wasted contacts, and wasted opportunities! We're tired of being frustrated by the way things are. We want to make a difference, a bigger difference.
Your organization will better achieve its mission with a well-formulated and well-executed Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. If you're like most non-profit, advocacy, and membership-based organizations, CiviCRM is the best tool for enabling success.
Does your organization lack an integrated system for managing contacts? This is a common issue for non-profit organizations, be they large or small, more or less organized. Can you identify your organization in any of the following situations?
- Do people in your office have their own personal Excel sheet of contacts that they use in their fundraising, volunteer work, or mail merges?
- Do you have one system for e-mail subscribers for your online newsletter, another online system with people who have attended one of your events, a different one containing responses to surveys, and a desktop system for labels for season's greetings cards?
- Do you have a separate old membership database in Microsoft Access, maybe developed by a volunteer or staff person, long since departed?
- Does your fundraiser have his own system, maybe an expensive one like Raiser's Edge, while your volunteer organizer does everything in Outlook?
- Have you lost access to data when a staff person left?
- Do you have old paper sign-in sheets from people attending events, indicating that they were interested, but haven't been entered in any system?
A contact management system is the heart of every CRM. Yet, CiviCRM is more than just a contact management system. As an integrated online system that handles contacts, donations, event registration, bulk e-mailing, case management, and other functions, such as activity tracking, grants, reporting, and analytics, CiviCRM consistently receives top ratings from non-profit technology users.
A successful CRM strategy can help your organization in many concrete ways. Here are some strategies:
- Improving the frequency, average donation amounts, and/or retention rates of your donors
- At a more basic level, enabling supporters to donate online through your website instead of having to get checks from them and recording everything yourself in your accounting books
- Automating the registration process for members attending an upcoming conference
- Increasing the likelihood of your existing subscribers becoming more involved with your organization and its mission
- Ensuring that more of your members show up to volunteer
- Identifying contacts that are already interacting with your organization who have the right skill set and interests to be worth approaching for a commitment about an open board position
- Making information easily available that quantifies what a great job you've been doing, including the number of hours that volunteers gave to your organization last year, the number of cases managed, and the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail
CiviCRM can help in all these areas.