The process of collecting data is an easy one to suggest throughout your organizations. However, the task of collecting organizing and using it to make business decisions can be a challenge. With so many activities happening throughout the organization, it can be overwhelming to try to collect it all, not to mention getting that data into the system in a healthy format.
A suggested option would be to implement tools where you can collect data from internal and external data sources, and when I say data sources I’m referring to humans. Now the human piece may sound a bit clinical, but when it comes to collecting data online you should make it that basic and logic based. In most cases it’s difficult to even collect data, so approach this strategy with an open mind knowing your providing the resource for users, and hoping the value your work and will provide their piece to the puzzle of entering their data.
A few suggestions for setting up web forms:
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Determine what fields should be required and what’s on your wish list.
- The worst thing to have is a form with 50 fields, and 45 of them are required. Your goal is to collect the most important data, and really the goal is to get any data period. Choose the critical fields set them to required, and make sure the form clearly indicates they are required.
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Don’t use the standard “Submit” button text.
- Instead of having your web form’s submit button say “Submit,” have it remind the user what it is they’re doing, like “Sign up now,” or Make a donation.
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Don’t provide a Cancel button.
- If you were buying a car and the salesperson asked you, “Are you sure you really want to get this car?” would you continue to buy the car? Probably not. Maybe you’d be hesitant; is the salesperson telling you the car isn’t a good buy, or maybe you should buy a different card?Same goes for your web forms; having a “cancel” button may make your users think twice about what they’re filling out.
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Try to not make two column forms.
- According to an eye tracking study by cxpartners, a user experience design agency, scanning down the form is preferable to scanning from left to right. It reduces the number of eye movements you need to make in order to fill out the form.
Review How Our Integrated Web Forms In Nonprofit Vertical CRM Work
When sales opportunity knocks, of course, you want to answer the door, but getting the opportunity to come a-knockin’ is always the harder part.
If you haven’t used an Opportunities Board before, this can be a great way to get your arms around all the possible engagement possibilities (sales collatoral) your organization has and centralized them all into one place.
With so many communication channels it’s easy to feel like you are having to look in multiple places to find the engagement tools you need to interface with a particular audience or campaign.
Opportunities Boards create one document for all and become the hub for your available resources and sales engagement opportunities.
We recommend storing this document somewhere in your CRM that your entire staff has access to so they can add resources as they come up or are created.
In many cases within larger organization’s different departments might have resources that staff in other areas are entirely unaware of, so this exercise really is one that sheds light and empowers all.
It is also a great net efficiency gain because instead of looking in the ten places an opportunity might be living, you just have to reference one document that links you to the sources you need for a particular outreach or initiative.
It also means you won’t miss that additional resource that you forgot was even out there.
One other big plus? You will likely realize you have more opportunities to engage leads and prospects than you thought!
The pace of technology is moving so fast and evolving in such radical ways that it might be time for your perhaps here-to-fore practice of adopting technology solutions, including your CRM, on the go to yield to a more thoughtful organizational pause for a full technology audit.
I know, the term sounds terrible and conjures images of official looking suits marching through the door and requiring their own conference room for two months only to tell you that everything you are doing is wrong.
But fear not, despite the foreboding term, the technology audit can be both informal and efficient and can offer your organization vast rewards in both productivity and cost savings as well as overall operational performance.
Traditionally, IT has been its own department and as long as the organization’s technology tools were in place and functioning, IT and senior management mainly existed in separate spheres.
As it specifically related to CRM management, there was usually a database manager or other designated IT staff that handled all the inflows, outflows, and basic troubleshooting as the gatekeeper to the CRM, and lived a bit in their own dominion.
But as the momentous increase in communication channels has evolved not only are more and more staff accessing their CRMs to manage donors and constituents, but CRM’s are housing more of the tools, functions, and integration potentials that allow organizations to keep all their communications and information organized under one roof.
This is starting to provide an alternative to the often reactive one-off product adoption that has been costly and fragmenting to many organizations just struggling to keep pace with what it actually takes to communicate across the many channels necessary to reach their entire audience be it donors, volunteers, clients, or internal staff.
A technology audit invites your organization to take a minute to bring IT staff and the executive team into the same room for a conversation about how technology can and increasingly must serve as the engine for your communications, fundraising, and operations.
CRM’s are no longer data storage libraries limited to primarily recording gift transactions, they are fast becoming dynamic, user-friendly platforms that power your outreach in everything from email and social campaigns to event planning and reporting, to project and program management; and they are the best tool for managing all of the related workflows.
Companies are increasingly finding that unless you have the right CRM as your communications hub, one that can integrate and house business critical functions all in one place, it is next to impossible to get your arms around running all your operations within the complex web of interaction necessary to sustain fundraising and communications in the current era.
So one critical piece to the technology audit is to assess whether your current CRM is equipped to take on the role of mission control and reign in the often unwieldy number of one-off apps and other business solutions that are currently keeping your ship running.
Audits often start out with an inventory and mapping of your organizational workflows to vet where your current technology solutions are meeting or not meeting the needs and goals of the organization across departments.
This information can then be used to suggest immediate shifts or actions as well as being applied to one and five-year strategic plans to identify priorities, shifts, and actions that will be necessary to create a technological environment in line with larger goals and objectives.
It also reveals whether there can be more coordinated products or integrations that might consolidate solutions and enhance efficiencies while reducing overall costs.
Staff tends to have strong thoughts and opinions about technology, and the technology audit offers a productive avenue for gathering those opinions and ideas.
This feedback can also reveal where there might be holes in training or user experience that might be inhibiting even a well-executed technology plan.
It also bridges the sometimes isolated sphere of your IT staff and elevates their role to an active one in overall organizational planning which it should be.
This is because often senior management doesn’t have a complete understanding of technology and tends to either overestimate its potential (“So can’t you just push a button and all of our emails will be sent out in a coordinated fashion for the year?”) or they underestimate it and are unaware of areas where it is being underutilized and efficiency gains or tools missed (“Um, actually yes, we can automate our entire membership life cycle.”)
Questions that usually get tabled like, “Should we integrate our accounting software with CRM?” or “Should we invest in more licenses for users in the CRM so more staff can share coordinated workflows?” also have a forum within the context of a technology audit.
This forum allows enough conversation and assessment to coalesce in order to thoughtfully inform these more significant decisions.
These can then either be acted upon with a timeline and action plan for implementation or more thoughtfully put on hold, but at least for reasons clear to all.
So why suggest that now might be prime time for your company to consider a technology audit?
Well, one reason is that you likely needed a small nudge since it is an often overlooked activity at any time.
Another is that because there are so many new options in integration and product consolidation at this current point the time has never been better to coordinate and simplify your solutions.
A third, and perhaps most significant reason is that there has never been a time when having the right technology tools and plan, poised to meet current and future needs, has been more mission-critical to companies as the communications and fundraising landscape grows ever more sophisticated.
Determining which products that you are currently using will have the ability to scale, integrate, and keep pace with this landscape and how your staff uses them will be among the most important infrastructure decisions you will make.
Decisions that will be the key in providing optimal service to and alignment with your operational and mission objectives. So if you are feeling like you don’t have your arms around operations and technology might we suggest an audit?
There’s been a lot of buzz about real-time data being one of the most valuable evolutions within the CRM software market and with good reason.
CRM’s were designed upon the premise that we could use data to drive decision making and strategy, and we have seen that bear out first with how it informed sales, and increasingly with how it can inform program and organizational direction.
My boss actually refers to our CRM as a “decision making support tool,” with the idea that any decision we make should be driven by our data, not just our gut.
I say “just,” because there will always be an important place for subjectivity and the vision of leaders that carry with them the experience of being in the field and on the personal front lines of a particular cause.
That said though, there’s nothing more elegant than when our egos can yield to include the objectivity of our data in the pursuit of realizing the most of our missions. After all, and we often forget this, data is just a way of aggregating and organizing a human response.
In this way, there is lifeblood in our analytics and having the right tools to use this powerful information to make decisions that optimize our systems will always be far from mechanistic.
What feels mechanistic to us, however, is how clunky our CRM technology has felt to use when pulling together these responses.
In the past CRM’s did not invite human interaction mainly because their very design was a bit sterile and machine-like.
As a result, they dampened the passion of users seeking to engage them as support tools to further very human pursuits.
As technology (from AI to apps) has become more user-friendly though, we are becoming more interactive than ever with our tools and design has come a long way.
We can still be left feeling disconnected and out of touch though as we gather a piece of information from one tool or other, but continue to lack a way to bring all of this information together in an integrated, real-time way, which is when information becomes it’s most valuable and gives us the most human insights.
So when we talk about real-time data, what do we mean? Let’s take an example.
Perhaps your organization has an app that tracks students who are suspended, the reasons for the suspension, and duration of absence.
No doubt knowing this information instantly is critical, but leveraging that information to make decisions depends on how integrated that app is within your larger technology landscape and that of other stakeholders.
For example, perhaps when this information is logged it sends out a notification to all teachers alerting them to the student’s change in status and asking them for follow up actions such as posting homework assignments for that student for the days missed in advance of the absence.
If your app is integrated with your CRM, you can have that incident information flow directly into your larger data pool to allow you to use reporting to track overall suspension rates week to week or year to year so you can track triggering event trends by types for example.
Perhaps you find there is an uptick in kids suspended for bullying, or perhaps more drug-related activity starts to become apparent.
This informs what interventions or changes the school might take to address suspensions overall in real-time, and if this report is automatically emailed quarterly to other community agencies it can serve to inform their perspective and potential responses.
So even in this simple example, leveraging real-time data can have both short-term and longer-term impacts within multiple areas of your organization’s sphere of influence.
We were recently working with a community foundation and had the chance to see another example of how real-time data was bringing valuable returns.
They were able not only to be on top of what their own data was telling them in real-time (thanks to their CRM and a few other well-integrated tools working together), but could compare data across their grant partners, constituents and staff, as well as across different areas of funding so that their whole community benefitted from relevant, timely reporting about what might be working or not working to achieve common goals and outcomes.
They were also able to share that data with funders as programs were being implemented allowing their stakeholders to feel connected and relevant to the work they are supporting.
This kind of active reporting encouraged continued involvement with the foundation and engaged their board members and committees in a similar way with up to date dashboards offering simple, but compelling visual presentations of current data.
Even something as a simple as a dashboard posted on your website that shows the up to the minute status of a campaign or event goal can be a significant motivator for action.
Executive teams, boards, and program directors are shifting from waiting until the budget season to look at last year’s numbers (both financial and programmatic) and coming to expect timely updates so they can make decisions and adjustments throughout the year.
Your CRM should accommodate this evolution by allowing you to set up simple automation triggers to pull and send reports or post updated dashboards on various areas of organizational activity.
For example, if it turns out a particular public health speaking engagement had low turnout for the first three times it was offered in Q1, and the feedback from event surveys suggest the need for more relevant content, or perhaps an alternative preference for program delivery medium (perhaps a webinar is easier for those with severe RA since getting to an event in person might be subject to how a participant is feeling on that particular day for example), these changes can be made as soon as the data reveals the necessary course correction.
Bottom line – if decision makers are automatically getting reports and results with real-time data, decisions can be made in a far more timely and informed fashion.
To achieve all of this, of course, you need the right tools, connected in the right ways.
Basic things like your CRM having easy to use automation and web forms that connect to your website and a survey tool that can pull data directly from or about an event or program and have it flow right into your CRM are some of the things you should consider when looking to incorporate real-time data.
Also, consider whether your financials are flowing into CRM so you can generate reports that can, for example, cross-reference program cost with program participation and send an automatic report to program directors and appropriate committee members or executive team members.
To make real-time data work for you, it has to function within an integrated experience where your CRM, website, financial software, and other mission-critical operational tools are all sharing their data.
And that experience should have flexible tools within it so you can you easily (meaning without an IT person) customize and add modules and fields to your CRM, or create a webform that captures information unique to your organization.
Of course, you should also be able to access all your tools on a mobile device so that your staff can input or pull data anywhere, anytime, and do things like engaging with someone on social as soon as a post, comment or like comes in to keep these conversations fresh, timely and authentic.
So it is good to ask whether your organization has the right technology landscape to support the valuable contributions of real-time data, and if not it’s a great guiding question to help you start to analyze what you might need or need to adjust within your technology infrastructure to make real-time data a reality.
It also means ensuring that this landscape is well-traveled among your staff, and investing the time and resources necessary to have all your staff trained on all your tools (not just having someone specialized in one or the other.)
With your tools and your people working in concert, you will start to feel how the harmony of engaged data starts to inform every decision your organization makes in support of your common vision.
So don’t let the opportunities of real-time data slip through your fingers – now is the time!
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