Shared Experiences

You may have received an email this week about some exciting news for our company. Metafile is preparing to move to a brand new location – a beautiful new building of our own after 20 plus years of leasing space in various locations in Minnesota and New Jersey.

It’s fun to be able to share that kind of news with our customers, and I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience when sharing the successes of your organization with your own constituents. In fact, I suspect that the processes we go through are virtually identical. Because whether we call them customers or constituents or contacts, in the end it’s all the same. We’re communicating with the stakeholders who have made an investment in what we do.

This is what we mean by the term ‘CRM,’ or constituent relationship management. In its broadest sense, a CRM system helps manage the relationships you have with your stakeholders. And whether they’re making a donation or renewing a support contract, the details are important. And what better place to store the details than in ResultsPlus.

In fact, that’s exactly what we do here at Metafile. We use our own product, ResultsPlus, as our CRM system. Your organization is our constituent, and everyone who represents you may have a separate address in your constituent record. We think it’s important to keep track of your email preferences, the products you’ve purchased, and the last time we spoke to you to see how things were going.

So when it was time to send out an email announcing our move and new address, we started with ResultsPlus to generate the mailing list. We did a query, just like you probably do, to find people with valid email addresses and specific mail codes. While we could also have sent the mass email directly out of ResultsPlus, we were dealing with a significant quantity and knew it would probably cause problems with people’s email filters. So we chose to export our list to an email service provider and let them handle the details.

We also use the EventsPlus module to manage our training classes and registrations. Each class is a separate session with registrants and tickets, and we use a single registration (along with some custom reports) to produce confirmation letters, class lists, certificates and nametags. In the end, we have a built-in record of all the training sessions your organization has attended as part of your overall constituent record.

So we share a lot with you, including a commitment to making sure ResultsPlus continues to be an effective system to manage constituent relationships. It’s certainly helping us to manage ours, and we’re glad to have such a relationship with you.