Understanding Constituent Relationship Management CRM for Non-Profits


Strategic CRM Context Constituent The first step is to understand how CRM fits into the context of the organization's overall business strategy. This entails first confirming the organization's vision for the CRM project as well as the project's business imperative taking into consideration the existing business environment and the organization's corporate strategic priorities.
  • Is the organization's market growing, stagnant, or declining?
  • Is cutting costs the organization's most pressing immediate concern, or is it boosting revenues the priority?
  • What's the relative emphasis between constituent acquisition, development, retention, and cost to serve?
  • Which channels are most critical for interacting with and serving customers?
  • What's the balance between product focus and constituent focus?
  • Who does the organization see as its most valuable customers, and why?
  • Answering questions such as these helps determine which CRM capabilities the client pursues.
CRM Success Context Organizational Readiness for CRM
  • A Valid Business Case, with Measurable Benefits
  • A Credible and Active Executive Sponsor
  • A Realistic Project Scope
  • A Realistic Budget
  • Successfully Managing multi site CRM Projects
  • A Pilot for Proof-of-Concept and Buy-in
  • Buy-in from Fundraising Managers
The following approach to CRM project development appears to give the best chance of success:
  • Take a phased, steady approach to CRM development, not big bang.
  • Develop a vision of the future, but do not make it too detailed too soon.
  • Know where you are starting from. Be clear and unemotional about how well you manage your constituents now.
  • Focus on a few easy actions that will lead to increased profitability quickly: cherry pick key actions and quick wins.
  • Listen to fundrasing staff: remove what they see as the basic barriers to managing constituents better.
  • Right from the beginning, manage the programme by outputs as well as inputs, to ensure that what you expect to happen with constituents does happen, or at least to understand why it does not.
  • Measure and build on phase one in future phases.
  • Accept willingly and unemotionally any challenges to your longer-term vision, whether they are challenges from others in your organization based on their analysis or ideas, or performance challenges identified during the early stages of implementation.
REINING IN MARKETING ROI It is clear that the time has come for companies to measure and improve the return on marketing investment. But how? The first order of business is to adopt a new approach to marketing that consists of six major steps: Quantify the effects of past marketing efforts.
  1. Analyze competitive performance.
  2. Identify under-performing initiatives before they become too costly.
  3. Establish accountability for each marketing element.
  4. Identify products and markets that offer significant growth potential.
  5. Reallocate marketing resources to capitalize on new growth opportunities.
A recurring theme in is the frequency with which CRM approaches fail from a constituent viewpoint because of their inability to integrate the constituent touch points, the lack of customer-centric process design and the failure to provide real constituent benefits. The main reasons for this are:
  • poor understanding of, and focus on, customers;
  • lack of involvement of, and input from, customers;
  • rewards not related to constituent objectives;
  • thinking technology alone is the solution;
  • lack of properly designed, interlocking processes;
  • poor quality data and information;
  • poor coordination between many different departmental projects;
  • absence of business staff on the CRM team;
  • late formation of the team;
  • absence of measurement of benefits;
  • lack of testing.