Certification - October 2008 - (Page 29)

development organization that relies primarily on client referrals and has service-heavy processes: incident reporting, service plans, personal goals and outcomes. This organization will need strong service-tracking capabilities but less rigorous marketing functionality. Alternatively, a membershipbased organization will need stronger marketing and sales functionality. An organization might use a different process mix for each constituent: • Advocates for a public advocacy organization: To recruit advocates, organizations would use highcomplexity marketing efforts. Medium-complexity sales efforts would focus on donations and calls to action. Low-service efforts would require only responding to questions and providing information about the impact of actions. • Members of a trade association: Organizations would use low marketing efforts, with some outreach to support membership and event sales; high sales efforts, including complex higher-cost memberships and simple sales of events and merchandise; and medium-service efforts, mostly responding to inquiries. • Clients of a service organization: Organizations would use low marketing efforts, with some relatively limited outreach; low to medium sales efforts, including convincing potential clients to participate in programs; and high service efforts, with complex case and outcomes management. Once processes are unraveled and identified, organizations can confidently seek the software solution to support their CRM strategies. to create software capable of handling the widely diverse needs and processes of the more than 1.8 million nonprofits registered with the IRS. Consequently, many nonprofits use multiple software packages to meet their needs — for example, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge for off-line fundraising and Convio for online interactions. Often, nonprofits have more sophisticated e-mail outreach needs than the vendors above provide, so they seek to add a bulk e-mail package such as VerticalResponse or WhatCounts. Additionally, human services organizations often have client tracking and reporting needs that none of these vendors cover out of the box, and therefore, they need to add a specialty case management application. In fact, some less critical constituent processes may be best supported informally, such as with spreadsheets. Buying a prepackaged suite gives nonprofits a lot of integrated functionality almost immediately. However, some open-source software platforms such as CiviSpace or SugarCRM and commercial providers such as Salesforce are providing powerful systems with flexibility to build custom-tailored systems rather than buying one-size-fits-all packaged applications. These platforms include robust ecosystems with interchangeable parts, making them an increasingly compelling option for nonprofits that can undertake a development process. The critical part of the process is acknowledging each piece of data and having a plan to tie it into a larger context — whether that means a packaged, consolidated system or just uploading a spreadsheet on a weekly basis. While nonprofits can’t expect to purchase a silverbullet software application to manage all this data, it’s clear that CRM software solutions nonetheless play a large role in how nonprofits run their day-today operations and the future opportunities they will uncover. 8 Paul Hagen is the founding partner of Kairos Strategies, a consultancy that helps social enterprises and nonprofit organizations scale through the effective use of technology. Chris Bernard is a freelance writer based in Maine. For this article they collaborated with Idealware, an organization that provides candid software information to nonprofits. They can be reached at editor@certmag.com. how Technology Plays In So which software do nonprofits use to support these CRM strategies? That’s not an easy question. There’s no shortage of software applications designed to manage nonprofit constituent relationships. But many of them — including many that call themselves CRM solutions — focus on a limited set of constituents, such as donors, rather than everyone a nonprofit deals with. In truth, because of the nature of nonprofits, none of the solutions is comprehensive or inclusive enough out of the box to be ideal for many different types of nonprofits. It’s nearly impossible for a single vendor October 2008 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE 29

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification - October 2008

Certification - October 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Troubleshooting Academic Connection What We Like Look Ahead Elect IT: Technology and the Democratic Process Managing Relationships in the Nonprofit Realm Interface VoIP Technician: Answering the Call of the Network Inside Certification Ad Index Endtag

Certification - October 2008

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