For many companies, social channels have been a nice add-on to sales efforts, but having a social strategy hasn’t quite become the norm as of yet.

However, successful companies are evolving to understand how social has become a lifeline for every company!

Part of the reason is that most CRM’s are not fully integrated with social channels, so engaging with and tracking social involvement has been challenging.

But the time has come people – if your organization isn’t engaging with social, it needs to get a life.

No longer is this kind of outreach superfluous, and with firewalls shutting out more and more email every day these channels are now a vital way to reach your constituents and learn how they feel about your work, follow up a post they make in reference to your brand, or just say thanks for coming to an event.

Modern CRM systems allow you to see your social channels and related activity all in one place using its Social module so you can track activity and respond in real time across all your channels.

You can also filter what social activity you want to track within this module.

For example, perhaps you want to track all your active contacts that might be talking about your organization or all those organizations that you have submitted proposals to.

You can even create a keyword search to track all social activity related to a particular subject matter that might be relevant to your organization.

For example, your organization is supporting particular legislation and you want to see any posts that mention it.

In addition, you can post right to your social accounts and track activity right from your CRM. Integrating your accounts is a breeze.

We hope these get you excited about the brave new role of social media because one thing is for sure, it’s relevance to your organization is becoming a vital lifeline.

Here is a quick video that previews some of the potentials of social working within a CRM:

 

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.

I wanted to highlight the power of being able to share a calendar as one example of how communication across your sales organization can be enhanced.

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 […]

As rule, the day you begin with the Setup tab in your new CRM should feel more like your birthday than Halloween. That is to say, you should be experiencing the joy of the gift given, rather than the surprise of monsters jumping out at you with complicated configuration expectations just to make the basic […]

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. 

In this video, Rebel Saffold III, CEO of Lebertech, talks about how moving your business or organization from an “Earn” model to a “Generate” model with support growth and more dollars coming in the door.

Over this time I’ve come to realize that the problems most nonprofit organizations have are not unique.  You may feel your organizations has challenges with systems and processes that no one else has but your wrong.

If you’re an organization that has taken the opportunity to invest in a prospect screening of a group of constituents or screened your entire database then I’m sure you have taken into consideration the value of the prospects home when determining the potential capacity of a major gift.