Book Image

Using CiviCRM

Book Image

Using CiviCRM

Overview of this book

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source CRM system, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations are among its growing number of enthusiastic users. This book shows you how to harness CiviCRM’s impressive array of possibilities as you develop and execute performance-critical CRM strategies. This book will help you become familiar with the structure and main functions of CiviCRM. It will guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples. Using CiviCRM walks you through developing a CRM Implementation Plan that is suited to your organization's size, culture, and needs. Readers will take away many constituent relationship management best practices and the knowledge of how to implement them with CiviCRM. Benefits of Using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, and help it better achieve its mission. Overall, your organization will interact with constituents more effectively and handle staff growth and transitions by tracking all contacts and interactions with them in a system shared across the organization. Gathering and analyzing data about your constituents and their interactions with your organization will better inform your decisions. If your organization fundraises, you’ll be able to raise more money and reduce costs by identifying qualified prospects for targeted fundraising initiatives. We show how to attract new prospects and convert them to donors using online, direct mail, telemarketing and direct contact channels Using CiviCRM. You’ll learn why and how to set up and then grow your monthly donor program, as well as improve the frequency, average donation amounts, and retention rates of your donor base. With this book you’ll be able to reduce the burden on administrative resources by providing online payments and self-service options for event registrations and membership renewals. You can increase the likelihood your existing subscribers will become more involved with your organization, ensure more of your members show up to volunteer, identify potential leaders and steward their volunteer activities Finally, you'll be making relevant information easily available that quantifies what a great job you've been doing, including the number of hours that volunteers gave to your organization last year, the number of cases managed, or the number of new viral signups from your latest urgent action e-mail.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Using CiviCRM
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How CiviCRM will help your organization


Good CRM implementations facilitate better outcomes and improved relationships with your constituents shown by, for example, more donations and volunteer time. They also improve staff efficiency and automate workflows, reducing the average cost and time involved in interactions with the constituents. This allows you and your organization to do more. CiviCRM will improve the relationship your constituents have with your organization through various features, including:

  • Easier online event registration

  • Self-serve membership renewal

  • More complete record of history of interactions available to the entire qualified staff

  • Automated workflow improvements for case management

  • Personalized e-mails

  • Anti-spam options to ensure all e-mail communications are permission-based

Improved relationships also result from deeper changes to the work of an organization. Segmentation of constituents can enable more targeted and effective communication and interaction. For example, sending a text version of your newsletter rather than the normal HTML version to those who have not opened three HTML issues in a row can improve deliverability. Cross-marketing action alerts to frequent donors or donation appeals to frequent activists can be more effective than sending these appeals to all donors or activists, since the latter may end up filling people's inboxes too frequently, leading many to unsubscribe. Surveying those who immediately return for more service on their case can reveal systemic issues in case of management protocols, or quality assurance issues.

Organizations with well-focused and right-sized CRM strategies properly balance the costs of acquiring and updating constituent information against the benefits of having and using it. Staff effort and constituent inconvenience mean that it is often better not to force or even encourage the entry of less important information. Nonetheless, CiviCRM will provide quantitative and qualitative information that can guide actions, inform executive decision-making, and allow balanced scorecard types of reporting to boards and external funders.