Wish #3: The Value of CRM

In my January 20th post  I committed to sharing items from a ‘Wish List’ - things I wished I would have known when I was an active ResultsPlus database user. Well it’s time for wish number three, and no one was more surprised than me that I never took advantage of some very basic functionality in ResultsPlus: the calendar.

I confess to being a compulsive planner and organizer. I carried a Franklin Planner when that was the fad, a PDA when they first came out, and now I am completely dependent on Microsoft Outlook which I synch with my phone so that my calendar is always current and at my fingertips. So how could I possibly have overlooked the calendar in ResultsPlus? I came up with quite a few reasons:

  • I didn’t recognize the value of having dates and times connected to all the other information I stored about my donors. I was faithfully keeping track of appointments and calls in my ‘planner du jour’ but had yet to see the value of adding that to everything else I knew about my donors.
  • I was looking too narrowly at the application and not recognizing its value at tracking the touch-points of our donor relationships. It was primarily a place to store names, addresses and gifts.
  • My experience was primarily in one-person offices where there was little need for coordinated and shared information across a large development office.

The value of tracking this type of information is now so prevalent that it has its own moniker - Constituent Relationship Management – and it’s one of the most commonly-asked questions of customers shopping for fundraising software. The good news is that ResultsPlus is a very effective CRM tool for that can help you manage a 360 degree view of your donor relationship. You can see forward and backward in time, and side to side views of their connections to other constituents.

Share your experience using the CRM functionality of ResultsPlus and how it’s helping you to grow your relationships with your donors and your organization.