What is Zoho CRM Marketing Automation? The role of CRM marketing automation has moved from being a luxury item within CRMs to an imperative and is one of the key ways to increase productivity throughout your organization. Thankfully a few of the CRM’s out there designed for nonprofits have made the setup and running of […]
Everyone runs their companies technology based on the unique business needs of the company and strategy. We wanted to offer a few suggestions on common pain points that all CRM Management professionals can use.
Listed below you will find a few tips and trick to support keep these areas maintained.
Modern CRM Design
Now that CRM’s are designed with whole organizational teams accessing the system in mind, the whole process of thinking of the desired list, submitting a request to the database administrator and waiting for that person to go through the often cumbersome process of setting up a query and then exporting that data into a usable report.
Using List Views
Sometimes a change in verbiage reflects a larger shift in functionality and this has certainly been the case in CRM’s now referring to queries as views.
I’ll review how you can look at CRM software views as a tool to support productivity with your salesforce processes.
Even if you try on the two words, you immediately sense the difference.
Queries sound scientific and serious, while views sound expansive and inviting.
It’s a shift from having to mine to extract hard to get at information to simply open the shutters to reveal what is already there in all its potential.
As designers have simplified CRM user interfaces across the board, one of the biggest changes has been the recognition that it shouldn’t take a special skill set to see data organized into subsets and lists.
Thankfully all of the cumbersome steps required in the past are no more!
They have been replaced by simple filters that can yield specific results in seconds within the same window the user is currently accessing.
These list views can then be acted upon immediately, such as sending out a mass email to a particular group, or they can be used to generate reports that can then be automatically updated.
List views can also be saved locally so users can simply click on a drop-down menu to bring up a specific filtered group.
Views are unique to each user, you can keep what is relevant for you in your particular role without cluttering up the system with a mass of views.
In addition, you can switch views between tasks so that you don’t have to pull up a report and consider it alongside what you are trying to do, the view that is most relevant to your task is simply what you choose, see, and work within.
When you are done with the task you just simply revert to the regular view.
All this leads to much more efficiency in executing tasks, running reports, sending email and social campaigns, and organizing your activities.
Want to see a list of all the leads you have not contacted in the last quarter so you can send them a quick email?
Wondering how many proposals are in the closed/won stage so you can use that information for a budget update? Just use views to give you those lists with ease.
Even the actual search criteria options have become both more refined and more broadly responsive to how different users might think to search.
For instance, you could look up all the records that “contain” a particular word within a particular field to generate a list.
The sophistication of queries remains, but with a far more intuitive process.
Queries were one of the great hindering factors in the democratization of the CRM for nontechnical users, isolating a seemingly inaccessible mountain of data and allowing only the most technical of climbers access.
The shift toward powerfully intuitive list views should not be underestimated.
One is that your whole business becomes more open, efficient, and connected because more people are actually using your CRM.
The other is that everyone is then using data to drive the key decisions and actions that empower your sales team and business goals, and that is where the real gain lies.
CRM software makes another leap – enjoy the view!
System And Record Coding (Don’t Over Do It)
As we’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years one of the first things I do is take a look at their code tables.
This truly lets me know where the business is and how organized their data is.
Trying to convince yourself that “your business is SPECIAL.” Like my second in command in my last job used to tell me
“It’s Not Always About You.”
I would love to have a conversation with anyone in business about how much of their work isn’t even supporting their sales and customer journey.
Look at your coding and how you look at the tasks your company is executing.
In some cases, companies have finally let go of work and tasks they have been performing for a year when we put their work under this kind of lens.
If you want to truly measure what your business is doing, you should be asking yourself with each activity you perform in your business “is it in related to”:
Is this one of the listed below:
- Identification
- Cultivation
- Solicitation
- Stewardship?
Managing And Tracking Data And Report Requests In Your CRM
I recently had the opportunity to stop in on a Facebook Page for CRM users and a new CRM system manager was discussing how she had an immediate report request from her boss and needed a little help.
Well after I provided the answer another user jumped on and discussed how she was making the industry more difficult for other because she did not force the person making the reporting request wait 7 days to deliver it.
I totally understand this person point of view and for a time I believed it myself.
However, as you begin to understand that the world and business do not work that way!
Business and opportunities present themselves at any time and it doesn’t come down to the need to provide structure and time for how you work.
Your right, database managers are very busy and are the superman/women for the office.
There are steps we can take to make handling the normal pace of chaos in our roles with a few proactive approaches that we cover in the video in this blog post.
A true professional in this field takes full responsibility for their role in the company, though most of the time our role is a thankless role we have to think long-term and strategically to support the needs of all areas of the business.
If you’ve been a CRM system manager at any time, you’ve experienced the situation where just a few months earlier you ask leadership if certain data points should be captured and they say “NO”.
Just to come back later and explain they need reporting on that data they asked you not to collect?
Staying organized and not letting data and reporting request slip through the crack has to be a priority when providing information for the company.
Make sure you have a logical systematic process in place for managing those requests to keep the flow of information going.
View the video below to walk through managing data requests in your CRM and how it can make the entire business more productive.
Heretofore data entry has been a necessary evil of the having a CRM; it’s also one of the major reasons most of your staff aren’t using the most powerful tool in your fundraising and operations arsenal. So for mission’s sake, the death of data entry can’t come too soon.
Let’s take a quick example of data entry’s cumbersome nature by looking at how your development staff might be experiencing it. Let’s say you (reasonably) ask that each team member log notes in CRM after each meeting or phone call with a donor. What you might hear in response is that the follow up took as much or more effort than the engagement itself.
Yet this information is invaluable so that when anyone looks up the donor record, whether it is program staff responding to an inquiry or event staff looking for possible entry points for developing a sponsorship relationship they all have a history and context for the next engagement. This keeps their conversations relevant and on point.
This kind of context is also imperative to maintain consistency in engagement whenever there is staff turnover.
Logging volunteer and program information often present a similar level of manual labor woes. Staff is tasked with entering hours spent on particular projects, information from volunteer applications or vital program stats such as attendance and demographic information.
This kind of quantitative data is vital for donor and grant reporting, as well program development and volunteer management, but it often goes underreported since entering the data into CRM generally takes a back seat to program delivery.
Email is yet another key receptacle for gathering valuable program, donor, volunteer and constituent information, but most will tell you this is where you can find the biggest holes in a conversation timeline or data bucket, with different staff reaching out or responding from different areas within an organization at different times for different reasons.
This can leave your team searching through both their organizational emails and their CRM to retrieve information and can make for missed opportunities or gaps in reporting and history vital to nurturing relationships and programs.
Rather than expecting staff to data enter all these email interactions into a constituent’s record, most CRM’s now offer integrated email so that every email flows out of CRM and every response flows right back in so you can see who has engaged and what those conversations were about in one place. This doesn’t necessarily mean your CRM has to have built-in email functionality, but it should certainly allow you to integrate with products like Gmail and Outlook that your organization might already be using.
The bottom line is that it is mission critical to have your CRM doing the data entry by capturing phone calls, emails, and other communication lines such as social all within that constituent’s or program’s record.
The same goes for capturing campaign and donation information. If you are still sending out direct mail campaigns, those generally need to be manually created in CRM as campaigns, and when the donations start coming in, those too will need to be manually tagged or otherwise coded to reflect that they are in response to a particular campaign. While there are bulk data entry options in most CRM’s, any database administrator or accounting staff person will tell you it is still time-consuming to make sure everything is entered correctly.
The same goes for email campaigns. Your nonprofit CRM software should either allow you to send out email campaigns as part of its email marketing functionality or allow you to integrate with products like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact.
But even if you have those products integrated with your CRM, the incoming donations are likely still coming in without you knowing exactly what campaign they are in response to leading to more research and data entry, and coordinated efforts between your accounting department and CRM.
With the coming of single source product suites, however, your channels should be integrated into CRM and enjoy the kind of direct communication lines that effectively eliminate this kind of data entry. Let’s revisit email campaigns to give you an idea of what this kind of direct line communication is like.
First of all, your CRM really should have internal email marketing functionality or an integration as mentioned above. This allows you to put a giving button directly into the email that can link donors to a landing page specific to the campaign where they enter their donation information.
It can look exactly like your regular website donation page, but with a campaign specific field or fields (hidden to the viewer) that not only bring that donation transaction information into CRM automatically but also ensures it is coded correctly to associate it with the particular campaign.
From here you can then set up a simple, personalized auto-response thank you and follow up series of emails with campaign updates. This eliminates the need for mail merged thank you letters that are a pain to set up or a generic email thank you that doesn’t further engage the donor.
For example, perhaps you want to automatically send out campaign updates to all donors who have given with the latest dashboard showing how their donation is being put to use (a key in establishing trust and a foundation for that all important change in status from one time, to a regular donor.) Because you have been capturing data throughout the campaign automatically in CRM, those dashboards are easy to create without any data entry and can then automatically update and be shared in email or website updates set up to be sent out automatically from within CRM. This eliminates having to export any data and then manually create monthly reports or send out separate emails everytime you want to send an update.
Or perhaps you want particular development team members notified if someone in their portfolio responds to a campaign so they can make a phone call thanking them. You don’t have to manually pull a report weekly and send to team members, you can just set up a quick automation that sends a task alert to associated team members when a gift comes in so they can then follow up. That follow up, by the way, will have much higher rates of follow-through when staff isn’t having to separately enter the notes and data from the follow-up call.
Let’s remember, the middle letter of CRM is “Relationship,” and every interaction your staff has with your CRM should be about supporting the development of those relationships, not entering data. If the data is already there you create a positive user experience for staff, one in which they feel supported, not taxed by their technology tools. Their CRM experience moves from being one where things are asked of them to one where information is given to them to help them do their jobs, and that means more of your mission realized.
These are just a few examples of how we are moving toward a data entry free experience, and there are many more, including how constituency portals and webforms can take care of data entry for you – see links here for more on those opportunities. And on a final note lets also keep in mind that with more data automatically flowing into your system, your ability to generate high-quality reporting and analytics is augmented. While this is fodder for another post, suffice to say for now that this increase in quality data better informs your key organizational decisions and moves your organization into a place of nimble, real-time proactive adjustments, rather than reactive, after the fact responses. More on that later, but for now let me be the first to say farewell to data entry – RIP.
One size doesn’t fit all, but for too long nonprofits of all sizes have either had to settle for stripped-down fundraising CRM systems with limited functionality (and let’s face it, less than appealing user interfaces) or be roped into expensive, complex systems that were unwieldy to administer for smaller scale shops. Thankfully CRM’s are more […]
If there is one differentiator that highlights the difference between CRM’s designed for nonprofits and all others it is gift entry. This has been one of the main reasons nonprofits have been so limited in their choices for a CRM solution, with only a few large players offering the necessary functionality to handle donations and […]
Market segmentation is an important way to ensure your nonprofit is keeping it’s messaging relevant to your donors by considering which subgroups there may be within your donor pool, including those who are still just prospects. For example, most donors choose to support a nonprofit because its mission reflects a set of values or interests […]