Nonprofit CRM

Volunteer can mean different things -- showing up at an event to hand out name tags, vs one-on-one mentor

Some orgs are tracking funder relationshps; or they make grants and need to track grantees

CRMs don't exist in isolation -- we're often asking them to manage invoicing, donor management, sales pipelines, newsletter, case management

Mix of Zendesk; Mailchimp; Notion; Stripe and our bespoke fulfillment system; Zoom RSVPs

• Very real privacy concerns when you don't control your data;
• Very real portability concerns when you want to take your data

Where to start: you probably have a newsletter already -- find out where it is stored and explore what else it can do.

Needs

• Relationship Management -- moving those into the institution and out of individual minds
• Being able to remember everyone's name and birthday and spouse's interest is kind of a super power.
• Tracking clouds of people and networks of people; organizations;
• Plugging those contacts into campaigns and tracking them
• Tracking funder relationships
• Metrics: can the network of organizations we're supporting exist without us
• Silo'd containers for relationships, customers,
• Reporting

Tools

• Commerical / Proprietary CRMs
  • Salesforce for Non Profits -- Free as in kittens
  • Nation Builder (Completely toxic; stories available)
  • Bloomerang
  • Salsa
  • Every Action
  • Mailchimp -- not a real CRM but some people use it.
  • Zoho
  • Action Network -- non-profit owned; great for canvassing;

• FLOSS/Open Source
  • CiviCRM -- self hosted
  • Hosted CiviCRM (Progressive Technology Project) -- other hosting options; most have their own approach to onboarding and training.

• Wordpress
  • Fluent -- not fully open source, but the data does live on your servers; Bangladesh based
  • Grandhogg -- not fully open source, but the data does live on your servers; US based, some concerns about the work environment
  • WP Fusion -- Zapier on steroids, connected to WordPress.