Software > Contact Management

"Who's that I just talked to?" Contact Management for the Voluntary Sector

By Michelle Murrain

Keep track of your organisation's constituents is key to being able to successfully meet your aims.

This article will outline what kinds of information to track, how to track it and what kind of tools to use.

The Value of Contact Management

Organisations have a variety of constituents, from volunteers to donors and potential donors, colleagues and those that they support or serve. Keeping track of all of these people in a way that allows staff to have appropriate and knowledgeable communication, calculate donations over time, understand how volunteers are being used, and other reasons is, for most organisations, a mission-critical function.

Because organisations have such different relationships with different constituents (donors vs. clients, for example) most often, except for very small organisations, these functions are separated. An organisation's client management database is likely quite different than their donor database.

In general, contact management of all types is important in tracking how much money the organisation is raising, how many clients they are helping, how many volunteers are coming through the door and what they are doing, and how many people might donate to the organisation in the future.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus more on the donor/constituent side of the fence, and not talk so much about client services tracking, since that is quite different in scope and function, and the tools available for them differ significantly depending on the area that an organisation works in. However, donor/constituent contact management is quite similar for different kinds of organisations, and there are a smaller number of very well known software tools that are used for this function.

What to track?

In deciding what tools to use to track donors and constituents, it is important that you decide what you want to keep track of.  This, of course, is entirely a mission-based set of decisions, based on the relationships you have with your constituents, and what kind of activities you do. For most organisations, the very first start would be basic demographics – names, addresses, email and websites, phone numbers, birthday/age, gender. Also would be included in the basic set is how that person wants to be contacted (mail, email, phone.)

Other important data to track includes employers, field, interests, perhaps ethnicity and national origin, education. This helps you understand your constituents better, and have a feeling for who is more likely to donate, or volunteer, or get involved in some way.

The next level of tracking is donations. If they have donated, you'll want to know how much they donated, and when. It is important to get an idea of how often people donate, and how much they generally donate. That can help guide future appeals.

Then, the next level is what is often called Constituent Relationship Management, or CRM. This includes these previous levels, but also includes details of contacts with the constituents, activities that constituents have engaged in with the organisation, and actions that could be taken in the future. This is a very important tool for tracking people who are closely related to your organisation, either in a group capacity, or a volunteer or major donor. If you have events, then what events that person has attended is very important to track. They volunteer, what they do, and how much they have done. Of course this kind of tracking and constituent management requires much more sophisticated software packages, and/or integration between different packages.

When to track?

Constantly. The more frequently you use this data, the better it is. If you let those donation forms pile up, or forget to note that you had lunch with a particular major donor, the data is not as likely to be timely, and of the best quality. For many organisations, this data tracking is part of their daily functions.

What tools to use?

Organisations have employed tools from spreadsheets to complex software packages costing thousands of pounds. The tool chosen will depend on a lot of factors, from the size of the organisation, and its constituent list, the complexity of the information that will be tracked, as well as your budget. It is very important, however, to match the need to the tool. Picking a tool that you will quickly grow out of, or will need to migrate from in a short time period introduces more costs in the form of staff time to deal with that change – it's better to try and spend the time early on to pick the right tool.

Spreadsheets

Using spreadsheets, such as OpenOffice.org Calc, or Microsoft Excel, is one way to make a quick start doing contact management.  Using a spreadsheet, you can search for names, add up totals of donations, etc. It works  for smaller organisations, or organisations with only a few (fewer than a few hundred) constituents to track.

A spreadsheet made with these programs is hard to share with other staff. If you have a small number of constituents to track, but you want to share a spreadsheet, Google Docs and Spreadsheets is a way to do that quite easily, and without dealing with multiple, possibly conflicting copies of a spreadsheet.
However, spreadsheets can get very unwieldy, quite quickly.

Email Client

One possible avenue is to use Microsoft Outlook, or another email client with a strong address book, to do tracking. The advantage of this is that it makes it easy to do group emails, for instance. And it has integration with MS Word. See the Knowledgebase article Using Outlook as a Contact Management Database for more information. A database system of some sort will give you the most power to be able to maintain a contact list with the minimum amount of hassle. One can start with a simple database written in Microsoft Access or OpenOffice.org Base.

Using a database like this allows for sharing, better tracking of larger number of constituents, and allows you to be flexible in tracking. But custom databases of this sort have pitfalls. You need someone with a modicum of technology expertise to set it up. If you aren't careful, it can, over time, become somewhat of a mess in terms of the reliability of the data. For example, many different people over time might interpret some field labels differently, or choose to enter different kinds of data unless you've included rigorous validation in the database, which is not always easy to do.

Customer relationship management program

Many, if not most, organisations find that moving to a package which has been designed to do constituent management is the best strategy. A CRM packages come in a variety of kinds and costs. There are low-cost and free CRM tools, including CiviCRM, Salesforce, and eBase.

CiviCRM is an open source, server-based application that can integrate with Drupal or Joomla, which are well-established CMS (Content Management Systems). It provides a web-based interface, easily shared among staff, anywhere they are. Salesforce is an enterprise-level CRM platform with a generous nonprofit/voluntary sector donation program. An organisation can get 10 licenses for free. EBase is a desktop package that is based on FileMaker Pro.

 

There are many CRM packages that are quite expensive, including Kintera  and Convio  Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge, and others.

 

In choosing a tool to do contact management, the most important thing is to match organisational needs with the tools you are evaluating. Ask yourself the following questions to help guide you:

• How many constituents do you want to track?
• How complex is the data you want to track?
• Do you want to track detailed activities?
• Do you have other databases (event management, volunteer management, others) that you want to integrate?
• What is your budget?

The budget question is a bit tricky. You could say that you don't have much budget for it, but constituent tracking actually can lead to more donations, and more income for your organisation – so it's more like an investment.

Summary

Contact management is something that all organisations need to do. The data that you choose to gather, and the tool you use is dependent on many factors, including organisational mission and budget. It's important to match the need with the right tool.