I attended a great event today at the Hollywood theatre, put on by the Meyer Memorial Trust. Although the overall presentations centered on video as a communication tool, I was very impressed with the folks at OneNorthWest who spoke on general communications infrastructure - in getting the message accross that the foundation for communication with your constituents is not the website, but the database. It’s the ‘conversation’ with the public that is importaint, building trust. Video, websites, podcasts and whatever the next coming thing will be are all great as a means of communicating, but nonprofits need to engaging strategically with the help of a CRM - that’s a Contact Relationship Manager. Business knows how to do this - they target us based on our interests, zip code, and tons of data they collect. And it’s worth it for them - because they are making sales based on that info.
Advocacy organizations are not making ’sales’ - but rather converting the constituent to do something - sign a petition, volunteer, write a letter, come to a fundraiser or donate - based on the conversation you are having with them.
The infastructure to make that happen is: email, a website and a database.
The exciting thing about this is that open source technologies are finally maturing enough so that a small organization could afford to get a CRM system working on the web and tie it into their website and email, seamlessly.
Some bright stars to look at are CiviCRM, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM..
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