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:
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:
Develop a shared vision for the desired state of your CRM and its place in your organization:
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:
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.
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