At the beginning of a CRM project you'll need to do some planning, whether this means creating a feature backlog for the discovery phase of an Agile process, pre-planning for an iterative process, or the initial work in the planning phase for a Waterfall process. What planning you should do and when you do it will vary depending on the process adopted for your CRM project, the general management practices for approving and analyzing projects in your organization, and possibly the requirements of external funders such as foundations and other grant-giving organizations.
The following outline of preliminary activities includes some items that may not be required by less formal and less structured organizations. Even if, despite our advice to the contrary, you're treating your CRM project as limited exclusively to the technical implementation of one or more CiviCRM components like online donation processing, we'd encourage you to review this section for ways to make it a success.
While the list is arranged according to the general order it should be done, you should expect and plan for iteration. The later sections will expand on certain items, particularly the ones associated with requirements for specific components of CiviCRM, but it's better to start at a broader, higher level.
Assuming that improvements are desired, develop an inventory of the current state of customer relationship management in your organization:
- Create a list of the main types of constituents that interact with your organization such as volunteers, donors, attendees, board members, staff members, website visitors, and so on.
- For each type of constituent, list the important types of interactions that can occur with your organization.
- Identify actionable metrics that measure the quantity and quality of relationships. Wherever possible, collect information for each metric or put in place ways of collecting the information in order to create a baseline of information about constituent relationships. Ideally, these metrics should provide meaningful ideas on what you should do. The trend revealed by the number of new twitter followers per week is better than the total number of twitter followers, since the former will help you perceive spikes more clearly that will help you identify effective message language or key influencers to reach out to.
- Create a technical inventory of all systems that interact with constituents. At a more detailed level, perhaps in later phases, create a data dictionary of all tables, fields, and their meanings related to constituent information, transactions, and interactions.
- List the known pain points in the current way of doing things that need to be addressed, for both internal resources like staff or key volunteers, and external constituents like case clients or website visitors.
- SWOT analysis (internal strengths, internal weaknesses, external opportunities, and external threats) is a good tool for some of this work.
Note
FPAGM Memberships
An example of the kind of baseline information that is good to collect is memberships.
FPAGM is simplifying its organizational structure in various ways, including moving from nine to three membership categories. Historical differences between the small rural church pantries and the larger urban, secular, non-profit organizations, and between the small restaurants and large food distributors, will be dealt with through board representation, program operations, and fees. The new membership categories are:
- Regular: Food pantries in the region are eligible to become Regular Members of the Association, and all but one has already done so. Pantries who join the Association agree to adhere to a code of conduct, which includes statements concerning non-discriminatory practices and a willingness to work collaboratively with other pantries towards the goal of fairly and charitably reaching the needs of the area's poor. FPAGM currently has 43 regular members. The annual fee is $250.
- Affiliate: Organizations that donate food to pantries in the region are eligible to become Affiliate Members of the Association. 127 have done so, including a produce distribution centre, two food wholesalers, a grocery store chain, several other local grocery stores, and a large number of restaurants. These businesses support the Association through their involvement in the organization, as well as through providing surplus food for distribution to the pantries. The annual fee is $100.
- Supporting: Individuals or organizations that embrace the mission of the Association and support it through monetary donations and through service or in-kind may choose to become Supporting Members. FPAGM currently has 56 supporting members. While the minimum annual fee is $50, some have given considerably more.
- The Regular and Affiliate categories operate on one-year membership periods from January 1 through December 31. Supporting members operate on a one-year rolling period by default, though the size of the gift may dictate a longer membership period at the discretion of the Executive Director and Board of Directors. Employees of any member organizations inherit membership benefits by virtue of the parent organization.
Develop a shared vision for the desired state of your CRM and its place in your organization:
- The vision can be the basis of planning goals and metrics for measuring success.
- During this work, focus on the mission of the organization, and how it is realized through relationships with constituents.
- List CRM functionality and features that helped motivate the project, for example, online events registration, including payments.
- List possible ways of overcoming current pain points, for example, data silos between staff or departments.
- Focus on the user experience of your organization in the typical interactions that your constituents have with you. Alternate between big picture identification and examination of constituent segments (either analytically through data analysis or anecdotally through staff and expert exposition), and close up details of specific users and incidents.
- Pay attention to the funnel(s) of prospects for high-value types of constituents. Depending on your organization and mission, these may be volunteers, activists, donors, new members, or others such as the public your organization is trying to educate about something. Clarify the steps on the ladder of engagement for these types of constituents (for example, website visitor, newsletter subscriber, online activist, event attendee, donor, in person volunteer, or board member), and the value proposition at each step. Consider new business activities such as creating a free monthly newsletter to acquire prospects, or premium members-only pre-event meet and greet gatherings to help with volunteer recruitment.
- Put specific energy into brainstorming:
- Ways to reduce time-consuming and repetitive tasks of staff and volunteers, for example, making more processes self-serve online
- Eliminating some tasks altogether if they do not adequately help the organization to realize its mission
- Imagining new ways to accomplish your mission, for example, beginning to use viral marketing and social media
- Optimizing business processes for external experience, internal efficiency, and general usefulness before automating them
- You may want to consider articulating the desired goals and metrics using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) project management criteria for more controlling and formal organizations or DUMB ones (Doable, Understandable, Manageable, Beneficial) for less management-heavy ones (visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria).
Note
The food pantry needs of the greater Metropolis community have grown significantly over the last few years, and FPAGM seeks to find ways to increase the operational efficiency while providing greater levels of service to its members.
Further, your members have expressed a desire to increase networking and cooperation among each other. In particular, they want to learn from shared experiences and find ways to discourage people from abusing the services provided (pantry hopping). Recent resistance from the city government has forced the Association to take a more aggressive role in state and local advocacy such as ensuring that laws and regulations that support the mission of the organization are put in place. This means that FPAGM must look for ways to present its issues, concerns, vision, and constituents in a more public fashion.
All of this has led your organization to begin the process of rebuilding their website and implementing constituent relationship management software. You chose Joomla! as the content management system for your website because of its ease of use for administrators and the variety of extensions available for building the site functionality. You've selected CiviCRM for your contact management needs because of the diverse toolset it will provide, both for your immediate contacts, members, event management needs, and future goals in order to begin case management tracking.
You anticipate using online membership forms to solicit members, profiles for member contact detail management, event registration forms for training events and the annual conference, and contribution forms for members to place orders to the organization for food delivery. They also plan to have online donation pages and may begin having periodic campaigns for more focused fundraising efforts.
You plan to develop appropriate metrics as your next step in developing FPAGM's CRM plan.
Create a preliminary project plan as follows:
- Determine the project scope.
- Estimate a timeline for software release(s), major stakeholder communication, training, and other project milestones.
- Estimate the monetary, human, and technical resources required, providing the basis for a preliminary budget of the total cost of ownership for all phases of the project, including both the implementation and ongoing annual costs.
- Estimate the benefits in terms of the following:
- Cost saving through efficiencies (staff time able to be redeployed, switching some communications from postage and printing to e-mail, and so on)
- Increased revenue generation (donations, ticket sales, and so on)
- Mission-oriented success metrics or proxies for them
- Sample metrics may include:
- Clients served (number of cases, time to resolution, number of repeat clients, client evaluations of service and organization, and so on)
- Number of events offered
- Ticket sales (number and value)
- Donations (number of donors, frequency of giving, recency of latest donation, and average amount of donation)
- Bequests arranged and received
- Memberships (number, geographic, sectoral, or other sort of coverage of target audience)
- Volunteers (number, frequency, recency, average number of hours, higher value kinds of volunteering, and so on)
- Grants (applications received, processed, average time of processing, number approved, and so on)
- Newsletter subscribers (number, churn rate, opens, click-throughs, completions of calls to actions, and so on)
- Media (number of mentions, reach, and tone of coverage)
- Web traffic (number of unique visitors, repeat visitors, length of stay, forwards to friends, number of Facebook fans, number of Twitter followers, number of re-tweets, and so on)
- Search engine (page rankings for various key terms)
- Set out the assumptions underlying the plan.
- Identify risks to the project success that will need to be reduced, mitigated, or otherwise managed.
- Combine the budgeted costs with the estimated benefits to develop a projection of the financial and non-financial return on investment.
Depending on the scope of your project and how you view it with regard to your overall mission, a more extensive environmental analysis (such as the SWOT method: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) could prove useful during this stage. Though you may look at the CRM initiative as largely an IT function, the reality is that it will impact every facet of your organization, and thus should be viewed from this macro level. A review of business process re-engineering could also be considered as an early activity because of its general importance and opportunity to think cross-functionally.
We just mentioned in the previous section the need to calculate the total cost of ownership in order to provide a sense of the expected return on investment in a CRM initiative. The initial cost of acquiring and deploying software systems is usually a fraction of their total cost of ownership. This is especially true for enterprise systems like CRMs that tend to have longer effective lives.
Although CiviCRM, Drupal, and Joomla! are free open source software projects, they do have costs associated with them. In addition to training for users, administrators, and any in-house developers you may have, there is a need for on-going maintenance and support of your software and data.
Security upgrades or patches need to be applied regularly to your CMS software. CiviCRM includes security fixes in its general releases. We recommend upgrading at least a few times a year as new versions are released (for example, 3.2), but not necessarily for each point release (for example, 3.2.2). One advantage of this is the ability to take advantage of new features as they are released. If you have customized or overridden CiviCRM functionality, you should expect there to be some costs associated with modifying the custom templates and software on your site during upgrades.
A major reason why software costs are ongoing for organizations is that organizations are not static. What your organization does and how it does it, will change, both as you implement your CRM initiative and after it is put to bed. The interlinked nature of work processes and software systems means that you will need to continue to adapt, reconfigure, and re-customize CiviCRM for as long as your organization uses it.
A second area where organizations need to plan for ongoing resources for a CRM system is keeping their data clean. Depending on the nature of your constituents and the ways you collect data directly from those constituents, you may find issues with incomplete, incorrect, and duplicated constituent information. Automated merging and elimination of duplicates can lead to problematic results. Manual work reviewing potential duplicate records is time consuming, but essential.
A properly conceived CRM initiative will yield benefits that more than cover the total cost of the system in terms of improved relations with constituents and cost efficiencies realized from labor-saving automation.