We are now coming to the end of our series of blog posts on how CRM software can work successfully for Not For Profit Organisations, helping them to make the most of the many different relationships they have, and enabling them to be more effective and more efficient in meeting their aims.

From being able to target communications with stakeholders more effectively to having the ability to set and measure group and individual performance targets, having a single data source for all communication information to being able to see the overall state of your organisation quickly and easily, there are many reasons to consider choosing to implement a CRM system for any organisation.

However, clearly all NFP organisations are unique, and there is no one right way to implement a CRM solution. It is important for you to make sure that you have a system in place that can meet your needs now and into the future. One of the best ways to do this is to ask a CRM technology expert to look at your needs and advise you on the best way to make CRM work for you.

Elite Business Services have years of experience of working with Not For Profit organisations to help them realise the benefits of CRM software. If you would like to find out more, take a look at the CRM solutions we specialise in, or get in contact with our team today.

As we saw last time, it is important to keep focused on the results that will make your organisation more effective. And a well-implemented CRM system is a great way to make that happen, as it provides new automated ways to make the most of your relationships. However, it is also important to be able to measure the results of these and other activities.

We are aware that in NFPs, as in other organisations, marketing operations may have a tightly squeezed budget, and need to justify themselves in terms of return on investment. Traditionally, this has been difficult to do, as the outcomes of marketing may not be easily linked to any one particular activity.

Of course, there is also always a need to ensure teams and individual staff are meeting their targets, whatever area they are working in. Ideally, managers should be able to have an up-to-date, easy to digest overview of the status of the organisation quickly, when they need it. This is not always easy or even possible if information has to be collated from various sources.

With CRM, information becomes easier to take in. Personalised dashboards are available to enable every user to see the vital information they need to do their job, all from one screen. Customisable reports can be produced instantly with totally up-to-date information.

Since all communications within a relationship are tracked, it is easy to see which marketing activities have been more effective than others, and repeat the best methods. Campaigns can be highly targeted, with full reports on their success. For example, reports on e-marketing campaigns can show who clicked on an e-mail, which link, and how many times.

In the realm of commercial enterprise, results can generally be equated with standard measures such as sales, turnover, and profit. Typically, in a Not for Profit organisation success will be measured rather differently – as the name suggests! Indicators of performance for an NFP will be as varied as the organisations themselves, but some examples include members for a Trade Association, or the amount of donations or number of services provided for a charity.

However, there are many parallels that can be drawn with performance indicators in the commercial sector.  For example, can you “cross-sell” other services to an existing client or beneficiary? Or can an entry level member be “upsold” to a more advanced membership package? Can a one-time donor be encouraged to become a regular donor?

In all these cases, a CRM system can help keep track of the status of all the contacts of an organisation, and automate various procedures. Work-flows can set up to ensure that the necessary action is taken, and activities, such as callbacks, can be scheduled into the calendars of users.

For example, A CRM system could keep track of all people who attended a particular event and then include them in mailing lists for communication about similar events. Or if a donation is received from a new source, a call could be scheduled to discuss whether they would be interested in providing further support.

Like any other type of organisation, good communication is key to the success of an NFP. This will typically mean having to deal with communications with a wide range of people and groups. For example, in a Sports Governing Body, this could include clubs, individual members, and sponsors. For a Housing Association it could be tenants, contractors and suppliers.

In addition, there will be a range of contact methods used, from face-to-face visits to email newsletters. And on top of this, for any relationship it is vital to know at any given time, what has been communicated, when, and by whom. For any organisation the communication requirements will be different. However, in all cases it is vital that the right people receive the right message in the right way at the right time.

A quality CRM system enables you to easily manage, structure and automate your communications. Powerful and flexible contact records make it easy for you to group your contacts based on almost any criteria and thus target communications more effectively. E-mail marketing facilities make mass communications quicker and easier, as well as providing powerful reports showing who has open the email, which links have been clicked, letting you better under stand the interests of your contacts.

A good CRM system also enables you to record all communications with a contact, so that any user can see exactly what state the relationship is in at any time, ensuring you can always be on top of your relationships. There is also the ability to schedule future communications to make sure nothing gets lost, for example you can plan a future phone call to follow up a discussion, or to send an email with more information.

All in all, a well-implemented CRM system could make the communications of a NFP organisation more streamlined, more focused and better targeted, and also ensure that no opportunities fall through the cracks. Next time we will focus on how CRM can help NFPs measure and improve their results.

In this and the following few posts in this series, we will be looking at specific areas where CRM software could benefit NFP organisations. One of the most important of these is information management. As organisations grow, it is almost inevitable that the number of sources of information for the organisation will increase. When this information stored in different places using different systems it can lead to serious problems and inefficiency.

For example, a charity may use a list of email addresses in Outlook for sending newsletters, a spreadsheet containing contact details of regular donors, and a financial database for the charity’s beneficiaries, with all of these lists maintained by different employees. In addition there may be another entirely separate financial system. Clearly the information stored in these different places will overlap to a large extent. Different people may have access to different copies of the same information, and employee time is wasted keeping all of these systems up to date, and it is easy for the data to get out of sync.

A CRM system would help in this instance by giving a single, central repository for all of your contact-based information. All users can access the same database, meaning there is no need to enter data multiple times. Data can be imported from a wide array of existing sources as a standard part of any CRM implementation.

Of course, you may not want all your users to have access to all the information you hold, especially if it includes sensitive personal or financial data, for example donors’ bank details. A CRM system will enable you to easily define which parts of the database you want every user to be able to access and edit.

A CRM system would offer an NFP organisation flexible and secure access to their data from one easy-to-use and easy-to-update source and reduce time wasted through duplication and searching for information. Next time, we will look at how CRM could help NFPs with their communication.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is well understood as a tool businesses can use to make their customer-facing functions more efficient, and to make relationships with customers more reliable and more profitable. While commercial users understand CRM to be highly beneficial to their work, there is less understanding of how CRM can be used effectively in the Not For Profit and charitable sectors. Yet organisations in this area can get great benefits from the successful implementation of a CRM system.

The term Not For Profit (NFP) covers a wide range of organisations including:

• Charities
• Governmental Bodies
• Trade Organisations
• Community Groups
• Housing Associations
• Sports Governing Bodies

as well as many others. At Elite Business Services we believe that all these groups could benefit from a well implemented CRM system tailored to their needs.

CRM systems revolve around a database of contact information, and while this has traditionally been used in commercial settings to store customer information, in the NFP or charity sectors this could just as easily store records of donors, members or recipients of services. In this series of blog posts we will be looking in more detail at the key benefits of CRM software to NFP organisations, and how they can use them to best effect.

Elite Business Services has successfully helped many NFP organisations realise the benefits of CRM system. If you are interested in how Elite could help your organisation, would like to find out more about our CRM solutions, or have any other questions get in contact.