Social Media & CRM in the Not for Profit World

I read a very interesting report the other day, back in 2006 (10 years ago mind you, so imagine how much more relevant this data is today), Microsoft studied 30 BILLION instant messages sent by over 250 million people in June of that year (2006) and found that they were all linked by 6.6 degrees of separation (and probably Kevin Bacon). This was done BEFORE the age of Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram & Periscope and at the time, Facebook had just 12 million users. Yes, just 12 million, imagine.

One can easily see how those numbers could have grown by 10x as much today and it furthers illustrates just how important Social Media has become to our society as a whole. We are connected, closely so, more widely than we have ever been. Suffice to say, Social Media isn't going away any time soon and Not for Profit organizations need to embrace it and make it a part of their long term goals & strategies.  

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will play a large role in helping the Not for Profits achieve:

• Efficiencies in improved processes & reporting
• Innovation in understanding the multi-layered relationship
• Managing Events
• Provide Services
• Growth

All these and potentially more can be achieved with the proper implementation of CRM. While CRM may stand for Customer Relationship Management, it would be a terrible disservice to believe that it is all about the customer. In reality, it is all about the RELATIONSHIP.

In a typical CRM implementation for a sales organization, the focus is generally on the sales process and identifying the pain points as well as purchase patterns.  But in the Not for Profit world, it is the Relationship that plays a key role in developing a donor. Also, in the Not for Profit world, a donor may be an individual, a corporation or even a group, this causes many of the relationships to be overlapping and therefore may even raise the challenges of securing donors. For example an individual may have a certain tie to a particular cause, but that may not necessarily mean the company he or she is involved with may have the same tie.

Toss in Social Media and imagine those 6.6 degrees of separation, the opportunities for a Not for Profit to find like minded individuals that have a social penchant for similar causes is staggering. Making sure your organization posts to all of the Social Media outlets is simply not enough. This is akin to covering the bases without really tending to the field. A properly implemented CRM can give an organization a full 360 degree view of the donors and the connectivity they share with other organizations as well as other donors. Connectivity that can be leveraged for not only the benefit of the Not for Profit, but for the benefit of the donors as well.

While the first inclination of any Not for Profit is to build a solution internally, the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of cloud based solutions available today that can either be leveraged for the Not for Profit space or are even focused on the Not for Profit space.  I will discuss this in a future post; but for now, CRM can play a critical role in the growth of a Not for Profit when implemented correctly.