Share The Media

I attended a great event today at the Hollywood theatre, put on by the Meyer Memorial Trust titled "Communicating in the Age of New Media". The overall presentations centered on video as a communication tool - which is great for those organizations that can afford it, and are up to speed on their online strategy. But for those who don't have a tens of thousands of dollars to spend on producing video, a general over view of effective communication strategy was in order. I was very impressed with the folks at OneNorthWest who spoke on this topic - general communications infrastructure - in getting the message accross that the foundation for communication with your constituents is not the website, but the database. It's the 'conversation' with the public that is importiant, building trust. Video, websites, podcasts and whatever the next coming thing will be are all great as a means of communicating, but nonprofits need to engaging strategically with the help of a CRM - that's a Contact Relationship Manager. Business knows how to do this - they target us based on our interests, zip code, and tons of data they collect. And it's worth it for them - because they are making sales based on that info.

Advocacy organizations are not making 'sales' - but rather converting the constituent to do something - sign a petition, volunteer, write a letter, come to a fundraiser or donate - based on the conversation you are having with them.

The infastructure to make that happen is: email, a website and a database.

The exciting thing about this is that open source technologies are finally maturing enough so that a small organization could afford to get a CRM system working on the web and tie it into their website and email, seamlessly.

Some CRM solutions to look at for nonprofits include CiviCRM, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM..