So what is all this CRM business anyway?
Yesterday, I suggested that the best way to track your fundraising emails was to ensure they linked back to a CRM system so you knew who was interested in what. But it occurred to me today that many people probably don't really know what a CRM system is, or what it is capable of.
So here's a suggestion - you can sign up for a free personal edition of salesforce.com - one of the leading players in the market. You can click here to sign up.
Why? Well for one, the IPDI fundraising guide talks about the importance of CRM, and the power of personalized and HTML formatted emails. Although you can do this via Outlook, any serious internet strategy should be looking for a more sophisticated approach. A system like salesforce.com lets you select a number of contacts based on a set of criteria, send an email to each person in plain text or HTML format (the HTML editor is very like Blogger's editor) and finally records the details of the email against each individual.
So when the Communications Director asks you what emails have been sent and to whom, you can show them the report, compare it to the number of donations received, volunteers signed up etc., and decide how successful your communications strategy has been for the week.
These systems are tremendously powerful when implemented correctly - I recommend taking some time out to investigate, and I will post again about other capabilities not available in this free system later in the term.
So here's a suggestion - you can sign up for a free personal edition of salesforce.com - one of the leading players in the market. You can click here to sign up.
Why? Well for one, the IPDI fundraising guide talks about the importance of CRM, and the power of personalized and HTML formatted emails. Although you can do this via Outlook, any serious internet strategy should be looking for a more sophisticated approach. A system like salesforce.com lets you select a number of contacts based on a set of criteria, send an email to each person in plain text or HTML format (the HTML editor is very like Blogger's editor) and finally records the details of the email against each individual.
So when the Communications Director asks you what emails have been sent and to whom, you can show them the report, compare it to the number of donations received, volunteers signed up etc., and decide how successful your communications strategy has been for the week.
These systems are tremendously powerful when implemented correctly - I recommend taking some time out to investigate, and I will post again about other capabilities not available in this free system later in the term.
