Community service organisations need to keep on top of
their connections with heaps of different people: clients, staff,
supporters, donors, funders... the list goes on. Electronic databases
seem to offer great power and flexibility, but there are so many: how
to choose the right one?
In this last seminar for 2009, we took a look at CRMs: customer — or client — relationship managers. CRMs are purpose-built contact databases that allow you to interact with the data in different ways. What different ways? Depends on what you need to do, and what the particular CRM is capable of.
Nicole Aebi-Moyo is an IT consultant who has worked extensively with community service organisations here and in the UK. She described a step-by-step process to best identify our specific needs and thus help guide our choice of CRM, before introducing us to four of the most popular: Raiser's Edge, iMIS, SalesForce, and Microsoft CRM.
Rebecca French is an information management specialist currently
based at Monash University, with a long history in the library and
community sectors (and fresh from considerable work on Doing IT Better
case studies). Rebecca took us through the process used recently to choose a CRM for Springvale Community Aid and Advice Bureau, including some discussion of the differences between a number of the free and commercial CRMs they considered.
Download the presentations
Doing IT Better is a social justice initiative of the Centre for Community Networking Research
(Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University) and the Victorian Council of Social Service,
generously funded by a foundation.
The 2009 Seminar Series is generously sponsored by Multimedia Victoria.
© Victorian Council of Social Service 2009