There are many different charity CRM options available these days. But which of them understand your special needs as a Not-For-Profit? What can replace your cumbersome excel spreadsheets? Which can answer questions like ‘How do I receipt easier?’ or ‘How to manage memberships?’
What does CRM Mean?
A few quick searches will tell us it is Customer Relationship Management. They are nearly all designed to manage sales.
But for Not-For-Profits, this doesn’t really fit, which is why a lot of these CRM don’t quite work as we need them to either. We aren’t selling to Customers. We have Contacts. We have Community. We have Church Members.
So what about Relationships? Well this sounds great in the new context. It is all about the people after all. How they fit together. How we work together. How we interact and integrate together. And, how we can help each other.
Then there is Management. This sounds promising! After all, we are looking for something to help us manage all this admin we are doing, and make our lives easier. We want to spend more time focusing on our Mission. Not all our time managing a growing number of spreadsheets and tables that don’t get updated, get lost, and are hard to navigate.
What Does a CRM Do?
Typically, CRM allows you to store information on customers, allow you to contact them, and manage sales related data. There are a whole host of tools available depending on which CRM you use, all designed around maximizing sales for profit.
There is a lot of crossover with the needs of a Not-For-Profit, but there are a lot of areas that are not addressed that are unique. So we need a charity CRM system that will help us to take care of our community, help us to see how we can connect with others and how we can support, care, help and encourage one another. We need to be able to take donations, and give receipts out for these quickly and easily. We need to handle giving numbers, families, mentors, newsletters, events, groups. We need to roster teams, track volunteers and hours volunteered, get forms filled out, and handle our libraries and…. There really are a lot of unique things NFP deal with!
So the basic needs of a charity CRM system needs to be able to see who is a part of your community, record and store information about them that is essential to your needs, mission and values etc, add notes and be able to contact people. Keep track of people’s involvement. Keep a history of communication. Be able to see how people in a household or organisation fit together.
The Bottom Line
If we want to manage people we need a CRM. We all want our organisations; charity, community or church to grow so it is important to have the tools that will help us with our primary task, focus, mission etc. and not be bogged down with administration. It is after all about the people, so we want to be out there with the people and not stuck in the office.
Which CRM meets the common needs of any CRM, but also understands and meets the needs of Charities, Churches and Community Groups? With a team behind it that are also passionate about Not-For-Profits, and focusing their development pipeline to helping these organisations, infoodle really is a great option.
Let infoodle be the heavy lifter in your administration quiver, and give you the power and time back to invest into what you are most passionate about: People.
