By TJ Griffin, Advocacy Manager for Kintera

The success and standing of a nonprofit organization ultimately lies in its ability to steward the relationship with its supporters. Through the engagement, involvement and action of supporters, a nonprofit organization:

• Raises funds to support its cause and further its mission

• Recruits volunteers and members that help further the success of its mission

• Inspires action and activism among its constituents to enhance legislation affecting its mission

• Grows its network of activists by leveraging the outreach of its existing supporter base.

As a result of this reliance on supporter involvement and engagement, nonprofits continually face the challenge of how they can engage members in new and relevant ways to inspire continued action. A social constituent relationship management system (CRM) provides the bridge between using basic information about your constituents to tailor content and effecting a deeper relationship with your constituents based not only on who they are, but how they engage you and their own network. This information allows you to develop meaningful relationships with your supporters, inspiring them to become more deeply involved in your organization's mission.

Social CRM for Better Communications

The foundation of a social CRM system is a flexible, feature-rich knowledge platform that records and manages the most significant information about your constituents, including their interests, giving history, action history, volunteer history, issue preferences and the relationships they have with other constituents. By obtaining comprehensive knowledge of constituents and using a single, interactive social CRM system to manage relationships, organizations can understand how to best target specific constituents with specific messages.

Organizations that do this well, such as MoveOn, Amnesty and NRDC, recognize that communications can't always be asks and that many times, the communication should reflect how a supporter's contribution resulted in a recent success, or affirm joining a campaign or volunteering. In other words, confirming your supporter's engagement with your organization reaffirms what inspired them to get engaged in the first place.

For example, when supporters become new activists with Amnesty USA, they will receive a series of messages spanning several weeks that serve to welcome them to their action network and affirm their involvement with Amnesty. These messages are tailored to what actions they participated in, what preferences they self-identified, and what preferences Amnesty inferred from the actions they participated in. By understanding your constituents' interests and preferences - and inferring interests based not only on what your constituents say, but also what they do - nonprofit organizations can transform the way they build relationships and engage constituents.

Social CRM for Better Online Interaction

A social CRM system also includes an interactive community component that enables constituents to interact with one another and with your organization according to shared interests. This fosters a sense of community amongst your supporters and allows them to work together toward achieving a particular goal. By sharing content, goals and a common set of data, volunteers, supporters, activists and nonprofit employees can enhance communications and community spirit. Interactive features drive the group to efficiently achieve advocacy and fundraising objectives, and create an extraordinary sense of accomplishment and commitment.

Other interactive features of a social CRM system are social networking and outreach tools. These features allow members to recruit friends, family members or colleagues by sharing your cause with their contacts. This option can be made available on all e-mail and e-newsletter communications your organization sends out, but should also be utilized on your organization's Web site. This works especially well when used in conjunction with online advocacy. Similarly, a social CRM system contains features which allow your supporters to drive offline networking and organizing such as tabling on college campuses, house parties, meet-ups or even virtual parties on a supporter's personal activist page. This type of interactivity allows you to grow your network both online and offline by leveraging the set of supporters who want to do more for your organization without having to carry high administrative costs.

These features are best exemplified in the political campaign space with sites like HillaryClinton.com or GOPTeamLeader.com. The basic goals of these sites are to foster outreach and organizing, raise money and ultimately drive voters to the polls. These same concepts can be tailored and used to further the mission of any nonprofit.

Social CRM for Stewardship and Rewards

In addition to the interactive features in a social CRM system, thereis a concept of rewarding participation and networking, which allows your organization to steward your supporters through an engagement model. Specifically, rewarding activists by giving them redeemable tokens or establishing a points system based on activities provides immediate positive feedback which serves to further engage supporters in your cause. Similarly, rewarding supporters for new activists recruited through tell-a-friend encourages viral activities that build your list with qualified leads, unlike a list you might generate through offline list building activities such as list purchases. NRDC's www.savebiogems.org site is a great example of using a rewards system to steward its relationship with supporters.

Social CRM Analytics

A social CRM system also includes reporting and analytics capabilities to analyze the success of your organization's constituent-based initiatives. Reporting tools provide organizations with e-mail open rates, click-through rates and length of time spent visiting a Web page. It is important to track this information to determine which specific messages led the constituent to open the e-mail, which of your organization's initiatives inspired the donor to click-through to an article or Web page, which pages the constituent spent the most time reading on your Web site, and what they forwarded to their friends. Ultimately, the full picture of a supporter's involvement with your organization does not end at a source code and click-through, so reporting that deals with what your supporters are doing with you after they click through is critical. Specifically, who your supporters are interacting with, what relationships they have to other supporters, how many supporters they have recruited on your behalf and what messaging or appeals inspired them to do so allows you to get valuable data regarding your grassroots organizing and fundraising efforts.

Summary

Social CRM provides organizations with a total view of their constituents' relationship to their organization - as well as to other supporters - and enables nonprofits to drive all interactions based on this knowledge. By uniting the online and offline activities of your constituents into a social CRM system, an organization better understands the totality of a constituent's relationship to your organization. The knowledge you gather, store and manage in your social CRM system is critical to engaging your supporters and encouraging them to advocate on your behalf and support your organization's mission.