NFP Resource was recently asked for advice about CRM Systems. We asked Megan Cunningham-Adams of Onion CRM , an expert in this area, to help us:
Finding a good CRM system for your charity or NFP is more important than ever in these challenging business times, especially as our teams need to work remotely.
Typically, we find that NFP’s rely on spreadsheets which are managed and maintained by different people, leading to incomplete, duplicated or outdated data, and makes tracking changes nearly impossible. The first benefit that a charitable organisation might achieve then, is the centralisation of their critical business information, and the ability to access it from anywhere – even from a cellphone!
Once your information is all in one place, your Contacts can be segmented by your criteria, (for example) this could be geographical, by their relationship with you, or by interests that they’ve indicated. These segments are then used to effectively communicate via email and social media networks.
Finally, you may be required to provide reporting to your board, to a funding body, to a government ministry, or even for compliance purposes. A well designed dashboard (such as this example from CHARITY TEA) saves hours each month/quarter as all the reports are pre designed with the ability to sort and filter at your fingertips.
CASE STUDY – Spirit of Adventure Trust
Onion CRM moved traditional business systems and processes into the cloud for Spirit of Adventure Trust. IT systems all ‘talk to each other’ now and the customer experience is easy and seamless. Improved systems have meant reduced business risk and increased efficiency for the whole team.
What has that meant for ‘Spirit of Adventure Trust’
Now that the CRM implementation is complete all a young person needs to do to join a voyage is simply go on the website and complete the online form. Their information goes directly into the Zoho CRM database which connects to the finance package, to automatically generate an invoice and confirmation email. There’s no double handling and no room for human error. The whole process is now easy and efficient. The Spirit of Adventure team are delighted at the progress and outcome of this project and are using Onion CRM on an ongoing basis to further support their IT systems requirements.