CRMs: Crucial Relationship Management
Sometimes work is work, and other times, especially when speaking with supporters or meeting beneficiaries, it’s much more than that. It’s a vocation, a mission, a hope of making a positive difference. Whether our intentions for our work are philosophical, practical, or somewhere in between, relationships are undoubtedly the key to our success.
Depending on the charity, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software might be better known by the moniker: ‘The database’, or ‘the spreadsheet’, or even for larger charities, ‘our data team’.
Often, when I’m thinking about CRMs it’s in the context of the current challenge I’m facing in pulling a list of contacts for a marketing activity or mailing. It is too easy to confuse the ‘how do I?’ with the ‘why am I?’ when it comes to using the data on our CRMs and the intentions with which we use it.
In episode 79 of the Charity Chat Podcast, we spoke with acclaimed fundraiser and consultant, Giles Pegram CBE, about the importance of the donor experience.
In episode 84 of the podcast, we spoke with Nick Burne and again with Giles about the opportunity and urgency created by the COVID-19 pandemic to engage supporters in the work of the charities.
Understanding what moves your donors, and how your communication can best fit into their life is one of the questions arising in many of Charity Chat’s podcast episodes. In our interview with Matt Barnett, we spoke about how video messaging can be used to deliver quick, bespoke and engaging communications to supporters.