Member Appreciation: Stakes Increase with Free CRM and Consulting Give-aways This Week
NTEN's Member Appreciation Month has gotten off to a great start with 5 days of prizes and 2 member-appreciation-webinars.
But you haven't seen anything yet!
I'm excited to announce a special Member Appreciation event and opportunity for this week:
- Join us for a free-for-members webinar this Wednesday, "Get More From Your Database", where you'll see and hear about what you probably should be doing with your CRM (that you aren't, because your CRM can't cut it, or because you just hadn't thought about using it that way).
- Enter to win 2 free seats for Convio's new CRM, Common Ground ($2400 value). You'll also get 10 free consulting hours ($1600 value) to help you get started with your new tools, thanks to Causeway Interactive.
>Here's how to play:
1. Leave a comment on this post telling us the one thing you wish your database did for you and your organization but doesn't.
2. Attend the free webinar on Wednesday to learn more about what you could be doing with a CRM.
3. Check back on our blog on Friday to find out if you won the free seats and consulting, worth a total of $4000!
Note that you have to be a qualifying 501(c)3 nonprofit and NTEN organizational member to win. If you're not a member, learn more and join today.
(And don't forget to enter your e-mail address when you post so we can verify your membership and contact you if you win! It will remain hidden to everyone but us.)
I wish I could pull live information from our 3 SQL databases and 1 Foxpro database into one report at the click of a button. Two of the SQL databases are accessible by the same application and the third SQL database is accessed by a 2nd application. The Foxpro database is accessed by a 3rd application.
I also wish that updates to contact information could be entered into one application and pushed out to other applications as appropriate.
My marketing associate wishes that we could eliminate the duplicate contacts that result when she's compililng contact information from each employee's Outlook Contact list. Integration with Constant Contact would be a bonus!
I just joined my organization recently and I wish we had some indication of what the people in our database are like. If we could at least have the ages of the people it would be great. At the time we basically have names, addresses, and emails. Its difficult to segment the database in any meaningful way. Also seriously considering pushing for using one of the several wealth hunting services. (Finding people within our database that are particularly wealthy.)
Another thing I would love for our database to do is easily target certain geographic regions for our messaging. I know its already possible but for me it has always been somewhat cumbersome.
Our development staff and online advocacy/policy staff know that we have big potential to make all our work better if we can collaborate more. But we live in different databases just like our lists. We need a database we can use to help build our collaborative approach.
We need our DB to update the membership date to the last date that the member was charged through our payment provider. This wasn't a challenge until we started using a recurring payment tool.
We hear this a lot, "why can't the database simply talk to each other". It's a common challenge - and one Common Ground is well positioned to solve.
How? Common Ground is built on an open platform. The underlying technology is used by more than 45,000 businesses around the world and has been designed from the ground up to support integration.
And since no single vendor can serve all needs for a nonprofit, you need a platform that can be easily integrated.
Common Ground allows you to easily integrate external products, many with just clicks, and no code. Common Ground serves as your database of record, allowing your ENTIRE organization to access and use the data, not just your development team.
And yes, it can easily search across the database using boolean terms or pieces of a name.
Since Common Ground is built on the Force.com platform, any email marketing product available from the Force.com AppExchange can be easily integrated with a few clicks. http://www.appexchange.com
Currently Constant Contact is not listed on the AppExchange, but there are many other products available. Additionally, Common Ground is tightly integrated with Convio's Email Marketing product. So if an organization uses both Convio's Online Marketing suite (Fundraising, Email, CMS, Events, Advocacy and more) and Common Ground, they will be able to leverage segmentations created in Common Ground for outbound email campaigns.
Since we are also still using a much customized copy of ebase 1, the list could go on and on! No budget for an upgrade in the present economy, but I am still waiting for an all-in-one solution anyway :)
To me, the most frustrating issue is integration between communication tools. We have to update 2-3 different databases for certain record changes.
Also, better search capabilities (using Boolean terms, more than one set of parameters, etc) to pull complicated lists would be a plus. As of right now, we pull lists to excel and narrow down certain things there.
Finally, web access!
I wish that our database (Raiser's Edge) did not require users to be added as Administrators on their machines (a violation of our internal IT policies). We've found that it's the only way that all modules will work, but it allows users a lot of power to "muck up" their machines. With only a half-time IT person on staff (me), this creates more headaches for me.
I wish I could call up a list by the amount of donation for a particular timeframe, not just the last donation amount. I also want what Mike wants - a database that could work with constant contact (or convio if we could get it cheap enough!).
Our current database is terribly old, and we are in the market with an entirely news system. I would love it if it was able to integrate seamlessly with mailing list providers such as Constant Contact.