Major healthcare and larger school systems have rallied around the concept of constituent portals for their users, but typically these have had to be built from scratch and involved significant technical know-how and expense. But as of late, there are a few forward-thinking nonprofit CRM vendors out there who have opened up the constituent portal to […]

Automation: We define automation as “the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services.”

A word that is thrown around a lot when it comes to using technology.

We would like to take the opportunity to provide a list of opportunities you immediately incorporate in your business to reap the benefits of CRM software automation in your business critical functions (and feel comfortable with).

  • Streamline communication

    • Communication with your leads, clients, customers, vendors and other segments happen without human involvement.
      • For example, does it require you or a member of your staff to remember to send recurring invoices out on a monthly basis?
      • Do subscriptions service reminders and lapsed subscriptions service reminders require a huge effort to get out of the door?
  • Consistent and predictable results

    • If reminders and communications with constituents happen accurately and consistently you can begin to develop forecasting based on the timely execution of processes and tasks.  If I know the night of the 31st, all recurring invoices and subscription reminders will go out with a link to a payment page where they can make their payment online I can forecast based on previous months of us performing this we will have an influx of revenue the first of every month.  In most cases when we perform this, we get an 18% immediate subscription payment closure rate.
  • Enforce accountability

    • If the entire organization is aware there will be weekly or monthly reporting on sales activities and they should use this to be successful at their job there should be no obstacles in their way for meeting expected goals.
  • Minimize costs, positive impact on staff morale and reduction in manual errors

    • If leadership or other internal staff members or volunteers are performing routine tasks in the areas of data entry, entering contact reports, tracking phone calls, updating event attendance, etc these are tasks that can be automated.  Which will provide a higher level of accuracy and increase the morale of internal staff members.

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 […]

I have often thought I was suffering from magical thinking in expecting that I could just put a custom designed webform on a site and have the information captured there flow seamlessly into my nonprofit CRM software without any coding required to set up the form and without any high maintenance importing.

When looking for CRM options many nonprofits find themselves with two problems, and they both relate to customization. One, there are simply not that many CRM’s tailored to the unique needs and requirements of nonprofits, and two, many of the existing options are built on platforms that were constructed years ago. This means that while there […]

In an effort to help with making this decision I would like to make a few suggestions on the products from the Zoho Suite that are cost-effective and easy to implement and use.