CRM for a non-profit

[jacksch]

I'm looking at CRM to help a non-profit I'm involved in. We have several "databases" of donors, prospects, media contacts, etc., and from my limited understanding of CRM it looks like exactly what we need.

I've got Sugar up and running, no problem there, and I have played with using web forms to capture data from our web site and add them as "leads" in Sugar. But I'd really appreciate some suggestions and guidance from more experienced CRM users...

We have some people that we should be contacting regularly about various campaings, some that are only interested in specific initiatives, and others, like the media, that we only want to contact judiciously. Other than the disction between "contacts" and "leads" (and I'm not sure what the distinction is yet), I didn't see any easy way to categorize people in our database.

Have I missed something?

Any suggestions or advice?

Thanks,
Eric

[roblaus]

Classical case where a thorough analysis should be done before even attempting to select any system.

However, since we did such an analysis for a non-profit customer I pretty much understand what you are up to. Unfortunately this is nothing that could be answered in two sentences in a forum.

My advice: Have a good hard look at your audiences and the way how they interact with the system (=your organisation). Furthermore check out the campaign module (do NOT restrict yourself to email campaigns but see a campaign as a classification rather than a physical act). And think very early of the selection processes that you will need in order to target the relevant audiences. Meaning HOW to distinguish (classify) and how to move/add them to a campaign.

BTW: leads are usually not yet buying persons without a (technical) relation to a company. They can be converted to contacts/companies once the business rules dictate so. IN your case that might be somebody who requested info material and may become a donor (but the definition is up to you/the organisation).

That should give you a start...

[jacksch]

Thanks -- I understand how they interact with us, where I'm looking for help is converting it to CRM terms.

How do I categorize leads/contacts so that I can subsequently generate lists of different types of people? I see how I can attach a campaign name to a lead through the web form, but I don't see a way to search leads for a specific campaign...

[roblaus]

That was exactly what I wanted to express with my first sentence because I knew what's going to happen (no offense intended)

You are looking for more sophisticated queries that can only be achieved (maybe) either with Sugar Pro or through some third party tools (Zucker as a more or less integrated one, Pentaho etc.).

And it's not only that you search for campaigns already carried out, you also want to create new campaigns following criteria defined by marketing.
Give me all journalist we haven't talked to in the past 6 months and who wrote smthg nevertheless. All people wo requested information but didn't donate. Al donors who spent more/less than the average - the list is endless.

I can only recommend to write all these requirements down, weight them and then start looking for a system or for somebody who can customize Sugar for you (probably cheaper anyway). Believe me, out of the box it won't be possibke.