What is Zoho CRM Marketing Automation? The role of CRM marketing automation has moved from being a luxury item within CRMs to an imperative and is one of the key ways to increase productivity throughout your organization. Thankfully a few of the CRM’s out there designed for nonprofits have made the setup and running of […]
The role of automation has moved from being a luxury item within CRMs to an imperative and is one of the key ways to increase productivity throughout your organization. Thankfully a few of the CRM’s out there designed for nonprofits have made the setup and running of automation far more user-friendly and far more powerful than it has been even in the last few years. With older CRM’s automation was a cumbersome and clunky undertaking for users and it took a lot to get even basic automation running. As such, it was underutilized and typically either not set up, or only used for a few redundant processes. This stood in juxtaposition to most corporate CRM’s whose designers focused heavily on automation and recognized it as the game changer in efficiency gains that it really is. So now is a great time for your nonprofit to embrace using CRM automation as it will only be growing in relevance in the coming years. Another tangential benefit of automation is that it inspires planning. If you know what automation and workflows to put in place it is because you know how these fit into overall goals and outcomes for your organization, both internal (for example, tracking development team lead conversions) and external (for example, getting a campaign to its goal).
Automation is a functionality worth asking about in some detail if you are exploring a new CRM. Here are a few guiding questions:
- Is automation easy to set up? This is definitely something you would want to see demonstrated in a demo.
- Will automation run on social, email, chat, survey responses and support tickets – in other words, does it apply across the system?
- Can you visually see the flow of triggered actions? If it isn’t intuitive to you, it can create problems when executed.
- Does automation include real-time notifications? Will staff be alerted when someone engages on any channel (email, call, chat, survey response, support ticket, social)?
- Will your CRM suggest macros for recurring actions and workflows the system sees you repeating? Users are busy doing, and sometimes don’t realize there might be a way to automate a set of tasks; smart CRM’s will see these patterns and ask users with a prompt whether they would like to add a macro to automatically run a series of actions.
Automation is an upfront investment in set-up and mapping out of workflows and communication triggers that compliment user’s roles. But the investment is well worth it these days as it is one of the most valuable tools in helping your team keep up with its many communication channels and to free them up to focus on higher level engagements and opportunities at timely periods within a given cycle or workflow. Across your organization, automation is the key to scaling your marketing, fundraising, and other communication efforts so take the time to see what your CRM can do. Power to the user!
Want to see automation in action? Here’s a quick video to show you how to set up a basic workflow:
For more information on Nonprofit Vertical Source CRM click here.
When sales opportunity knocks, of course, you want to answer the door, but getting the opportunity to come a-knockin’ is always the harder part.
If you haven’t used an Opportunities Board before, this can be a great way to get your arms around all the possible engagement possibilities (sales collatoral) your organization has and centralized them all into one place.
With so many communication channels it’s easy to feel like you are having to look in multiple places to find the engagement tools you need to interface with a particular audience or campaign.
Opportunities Boards create one document for all and become the hub for your available resources and sales engagement opportunities.
We recommend storing this document somewhere in your CRM that your entire staff has access to so they can add resources as they come up or are created.
In many cases within larger organization’s different departments might have resources that staff in other areas are entirely unaware of, so this exercise really is one that sheds light and empowers all.
It is also a great net efficiency gain because instead of looking in the ten places an opportunity might be living, you just have to reference one document that links you to the sources you need for a particular outreach or initiative.
It also means you won’t miss that additional resource that you forgot was even out there.
One other big plus? You will likely realize you have more opportunities to engage leads and prospects than you thought!
The pace of technology is moving so fast and evolving in such radical ways that it might be time for your perhaps here-to-fore practice of adopting technology solutions, including your CRM, on the go to yield to a more thoughtful organizational pause for a full technology audit.
I know, the term sounds terrible and conjures images of official looking suits marching through the door and requiring their own conference room for two months only to tell you that everything you are doing is wrong.
But fear not, despite the foreboding term, the technology audit can be both informal and efficient and can offer your organization vast rewards in both productivity and cost savings as well as overall operational performance.
Traditionally, IT has been its own department and as long as the organization’s technology tools were in place and functioning, IT and senior management mainly existed in separate spheres.
As it specifically related to CRM management, there was usually a database manager or other designated IT staff that handled all the inflows, outflows, and basic troubleshooting as the gatekeeper to the CRM, and lived a bit in their own dominion.
But as the momentous increase in communication channels has evolved not only are more and more staff accessing their CRMs to manage donors and constituents, but CRM’s are housing more of the tools, functions, and integration potentials that allow organizations to keep all their communications and information organized under one roof.
This is starting to provide an alternative to the often reactive one-off product adoption that has been costly and fragmenting to many organizations just struggling to keep pace with what it actually takes to communicate across the many channels necessary to reach their entire audience be it donors, volunteers, clients, or internal staff.
A technology audit invites your organization to take a minute to bring IT staff and the executive team into the same room for a conversation about how technology can and increasingly must serve as the engine for your communications, fundraising, and operations.
CRM’s are no longer data storage libraries limited to primarily recording gift transactions, they are fast becoming dynamic, user-friendly platforms that power your outreach in everything from email and social campaigns to event planning and reporting, to project and program management; and they are the best tool for managing all of the related workflows.
Companies are increasingly finding that unless you have the right CRM as your communications hub, one that can integrate and house business critical functions all in one place, it is next to impossible to get your arms around running all your operations within the complex web of interaction necessary to sustain fundraising and communications in the current era.
So one critical piece to the technology audit is to assess whether your current CRM is equipped to take on the role of mission control and reign in the often unwieldy number of one-off apps and other business solutions that are currently keeping your ship running.
Audits often start out with an inventory and mapping of your organizational workflows to vet where your current technology solutions are meeting or not meeting the needs and goals of the organization across departments.
This information can then be used to suggest immediate shifts or actions as well as being applied to one and five-year strategic plans to identify priorities, shifts, and actions that will be necessary to create a technological environment in line with larger goals and objectives.
It also reveals whether there can be more coordinated products or integrations that might consolidate solutions and enhance efficiencies while reducing overall costs.
Staff tends to have strong thoughts and opinions about technology, and the technology audit offers a productive avenue for gathering those opinions and ideas.
This feedback can also reveal where there might be holes in training or user experience that might be inhibiting even a well-executed technology plan.
It also bridges the sometimes isolated sphere of your IT staff and elevates their role to an active one in overall organizational planning which it should be.
This is because often senior management doesn’t have a complete understanding of technology and tends to either overestimate its potential (“So can’t you just push a button and all of our emails will be sent out in a coordinated fashion for the year?”) or they underestimate it and are unaware of areas where it is being underutilized and efficiency gains or tools missed (“Um, actually yes, we can automate our entire membership life cycle.”)
Questions that usually get tabled like, “Should we integrate our accounting software with CRM?” or “Should we invest in more licenses for users in the CRM so more staff can share coordinated workflows?” also have a forum within the context of a technology audit.
This forum allows enough conversation and assessment to coalesce in order to thoughtfully inform these more significant decisions.
These can then either be acted upon with a timeline and action plan for implementation or more thoughtfully put on hold, but at least for reasons clear to all.
So why suggest that now might be prime time for your company to consider a technology audit?
Well, one reason is that you likely needed a small nudge since it is an often overlooked activity at any time.
Another is that because there are so many new options in integration and product consolidation at this current point the time has never been better to coordinate and simplify your solutions.
A third, and perhaps most significant reason is that there has never been a time when having the right technology tools and plan, poised to meet current and future needs, has been more mission-critical to companies as the communications and fundraising landscape grows ever more sophisticated.
Determining which products that you are currently using will have the ability to scale, integrate, and keep pace with this landscape and how your staff uses them will be among the most important infrastructure decisions you will make.
Decisions that will be the key in providing optimal service to and alignment with your operational and mission objectives. So if you are feeling like you don’t have your arms around operations and technology might we suggest an audit?
One size doesn’t fit all, but for too long nonprofits of all sizes have either had to settle for stripped-down fundraising CRM systems with limited functionality (and let’s face it, less than appealing user interfaces) or be roped into expensive, complex systems that were unwieldy to administer for smaller scale shops. Thankfully CRM’s are more […]
For many companies, social channels have been a nice add-on to sales efforts, but having a social strategy hasn’t quite become the norm as of yet.
However, successful companies are evolving to understand how social has become a lifeline for every company!
Part of the reason is that most CRM’s are not fully integrated with social channels, so engaging with and tracking social involvement has been challenging.
But the time has come people – if your organization isn’t engaging with social, it needs to get a life.
No longer is this kind of outreach superfluous, and with firewalls shutting out more and more email every day these channels are now a vital way to reach your constituents and learn how they feel about your work, follow up a post they make in reference to your brand, or just say thanks for coming to an event.
Modern CRM systems allow you to see your social channels and related activity all in one place using its Social module so you can track activity and respond in real time across all your channels.
You can also filter what social activity you want to track within this module.
For example, perhaps you want to track all your active contacts that might be talking about your organization or all those organizations that you have submitted proposals to.
You can even create a keyword search to track all social activity related to a particular subject matter that might be relevant to your organization.
For example, your organization is supporting particular legislation and you want to see any posts that mention it.
In addition, you can post right to your social accounts and track activity right from your CRM. Integrating your accounts is a breeze.
We hope these get you excited about the brave new role of social media because one thing is for sure, it’s relevance to your organization is becoming a vital lifeline.
Here is a quick video that previews some of the potentials of social working within a CRM: