Creating the Relationship-Centric Organization

A great piece by Paul Hagen on making the leap from "donor databases" to "constituent relationship management."

Our friend, colleague and fellow database consultant Paul Hagen has written an excellent piece for Idealware entitled "Creating the Relationship-Centric Organization."  In it, Paul does a great job of explaining the conceptual leap from "donor databases" to "constituent relationship management" (CRM) -- thinking about ALL of the relationships your organization needs to track, manage and grow:

Every nonprofit manages relationships with constituents, whether through a sophisticated tool or through scraps of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and miscellaneous databases. However, managing through these informal and decentralized methods is inefficient if not downright chaotic.... Isolated silos of contact data means that supporters may only hear about one aspect of the organization – for instance, they may hear about fundraising needs but miss communications that would tell them about accomplishments or volunteer needs.

Poor management of constituent data translates to greater costs, lost revenue, and decreased impact.

Is your organization Relationship-Centric?
How well is your organization doing with its CRM strategy? Our sector divides into four categories on this critical measure:

• Constituent Chaos. Some organizations have constituent data scattered everywhere. They have irregular, one-size-fits-all communications with supporters, and miss many opportunities to gain more value from constituents or grow relationships. These organizations can be described as being in a state of Constituent Chaos. They are underserving their organizations’ mission by failing to engage supporters more robustly.

• Self-Centric. Self-Centric nonprofits have constituent data consolidated into one or only a few places (they are likely to be newer organizations with up-to-date systems), but focus their attention primarily inward rather than on interactions with the outside world. Like organizations in a state of constituent chaos, they do little to differentiate between their supporters and miss many opportunities to cross-promote different aspects of the organization.

• Enlightened Stone-age. Enlightened Stone-age nonprofits appreciate and actively seek to engage their constituents with high quality interactions, but a multiplicity of data collection mechanisms requires staff to jump through hoops to coordinate outreach.

• Relationship-Centric. The organizations that have contact data consolidated in only a few places, have regular targeted interactions with constituents in which they cross-promote different aspects of the organization and create opportunities to grow the value of their constituents are Relationship-Centric nonprofits. They maximize their relationships with supporters: they regularly increase the average donation size and effectively engage an increasingly wide swath of constituents to take actions to meet the organization’s goals.
  
  

If your organization is thinking about how to improve your database situation, Paul's article is a great background piece. The concepts he describes are at the heart of ONE/Northwest database consulting practice.

Read the whole article at:

http://www.idealware.org/articles/
relationship_centric_org_CRM.php