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CRM for Nonprofit Organizations

At the center of every nonprofit is community. Your relationship with volunteers, donors, and citizens form a vital network, that’s your long term success. As organizations grow, managing these relationships becomes a balancing act. When not managed effectively, growth can lead to overextension and exhaustion. For organizations already strapped for resources, a flood of new projects can lead to breakdowns in morale and operational efficiency.

So how do you do the most good for the least cost to your organization? 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a cost effective tool for managing healthy, sustainable growth. CRM provides organizations the resources they need to better manage any enterprise. You can think of it as a labor multiplier. CRM enables fewer people to do more, with less, thereby saving you time and money through increased operational efficiency. A Complete CRM coalesces all of your vital data into a single digital location, where it can be easily organized and manipulated by a suite of powerful business applications.  

If you’ve reached this point in my article, you're probably skeptically shaking your head right now, thinking, “We can’t possibly afford something like that. Our budget’s already tight as it is.” Well actually, yes, you can. GreenRope is offering free access to our entire platform for all registered NPOs, indefinitely! Every 501(c)(3) is entitled to better business management software, courtesy of CEO, Lars Helgeson.

 

Amplifying Awareness

Successful NPOs are the hallmark of healthy, happy communities. The endless hours of selfless labor provided by these organizations improve the lives of everyone they touch. For this reason, it’s essential to keep track of brand interactions. Every person you share an experience with has the potential to become a future volunteer, donor, or recipient of aid. By collecting basic contact information and starting a dialogue, you can nurture blossoming relationships into fruitful partnerships. CRM provides a space for recording contact information, tracking brand touchpoints, and facilitating superior digital experiences.

Every nonprofit is its own brand. For smaller NPOs, the practice of branding can sound cringy. It represents the profit driven business world you left behind when you committed yourself to a higher purpose. Rest assured, generating positive brand awareness is vital to the continued health of your organization. Cultivating a celebrated brand identity will incentivize donors and help recruit talented team members. It also makes communities in need aware of your services. Your ability to help others is intertwined with your ability to generate awareness and leverage community support. So spread the word with GreenRope’s intuitive tools for marketing automation!

 

Email

GreenRope’s Emailer and Email EasyBuilder make it easy to create visually compelling, sophisticated emails. It’s not just for keeping your people up to date. You can use email broadcasts to send surveys, event invites, and documents. The templates you create can be sent directly from within the Emailer itself, where you can use filter options to segment your list of recipients based on tags, groups, or data fields. Your templates can also be used as assets in other forms of marketing automation, like drip campaigns, journeys, and workflows.

 

Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns are a strategic series of emails which can be sent to one of your groups. Drips can be used to familiarize new contacts with your organization by sharing bite sized pieces of information with them over an extended period of time. They can also be used to bring awareness to a new initiative, or inform people about the importance of your cause. 

Pro Tip: Knowing that drip campaigns are activated on a per group basis, you want your campaigns to strategically align with the group they’re sent to. A classic example of how NPOs have utilized drip campaigns is setting up a fundraising campaign for a donors group, and a ‘get involved’ campaign for interested volunteers.

 

Journeys

Many new users gravitate towards drip campaigns because of the simplicity with which they can be built and executed. Bold, tech savvy users, on the other hand, find themselves drawn to our ‘Journeys’ tool. Journeys offers an extra level of sophistication, which uses true/false logic to alter contacts’ path. They’re made up of ‘action, delay, decision’ sequences, with a split occurring at the decision phase. The decision phase will send some contacts one way and the rest another, depending on how they interacted with your last action. 

An example of a journey built for a fundraiser could be ‘action: an email is sent about a new fundraising initiative for an important cause > delay: 48 hours > decision: if true, contact read or clicked previous > action: send follow up email requesting a holiday donation, if false > action: send an email describing the the dangers of malnutrition in urban centers and your initiative’s efforts to combat it.’ 

Depending on how simple or complex you choose to make your journey you could end up having a few diverging paths, or a sprawling network of infinite possibilities that can even loop back on itself. Our drag and drop interface allows for endless possibilities. The only limit is your creativity. 

 

Data Integrity/ Security

Before you begin any digital transformation, you need data security. Contacts who opt into your mailing list are trusting you with their personal information. This level of intimacy is something that many people share almost exclusively with family and close friends. It’s critical that identifying information be safeguarded against possible data breaches. Beyond contact information, your CRM contains sensitive data about your organization.

GreenRope appreciates the extraordinary amount of trust organizations place in our product, which is why we adhere to strict data security protocols. We will never sell, distribute, or share any information about your organization without asking your permission first, and we don’t bury that permission in fine print. It’s our policy to always communicate with registered account owners when we have major upgrades or maintenance being done to the system. Additionally, our state of the art firewall protection and extremely restricted access helps guard against possible breaches. 

To keep your information secure each account is in its own database, separate from all others accounts in the system. Access to this database is limited by you. Using shared access permissions, you can assign varying degrees of account access to partners and team members. 

It might make sense that some people are given access to contacts, but are withheld the ability to export, while maybe others are given permission to create and send emails, but are barred access to our accounting feature. The over two dozen individual permissions we offer can easily be mixed and matched to meet your specific business needs. Additionally, you don’t need to feel pressured to share a login. We offer unlimited users to every organization, no strings attached.

In addition to data security, we insulate organizations from legal repercussions resulting from noncompliance with international digital communication law. The GreenRope platform is built in compliance with CAN-SPAM, CASL, and the EU-US Privacy Shield. We’ve purposefully made it virtually impossible for businesses to be guilty of breaking regulations they didn’t know existed. You won’t have to worry about paying out million dollar fines or paying possible jail time for not including an unsubscribe link or deleting contacts before a sixty day period without communication has elapsed. We automatically include unsubscribe links in every email and make it impossible to prematurely delete contacts.

 

Operational Efficiency

The secret sauce of Complete CRM is its ability to streamline and simplify internal processes. GreenRope is more than a warehouse to store critical data. It’s a collection of powerful applications that interact with each other and share information. Apps like accounting, ticketing, project management, learning management, wiki, and more, improve day to day operations by minimizing obstructive data silos. By enabling data to freely circulate throughout your organization, you eliminate wasted time spent digging around for the right documents. The same way a body’s circulatory system pumps blood to deliver nourishing oxygen to the places that need it, GreenRope sends the right data to the applications that need it to function. You’ll never have to waste time manually pulling info from one location to another, because everything you need is available instantly at your fingertips. Let the power of digital transformation do the work, so you don’t have to. 

Detailing the uses for every GreenRope app would require me to write a full book. For that reason I’ll only list a few of the “best hits.”

 

Project Management

Project management helps you break up larger projects into smaller tasks that can be easily assigned to team members. Our project manager also features a timer you can use to track hours for volunteers and administrators. When team members are ready to submit their hours, they can also include a description of what they were able to accomplish that day with notes about efficacy, mishaps, or wins.

 

LMS

Our Learning Management System is great for onboarding new volunteers. You can create modules consisting of informative articles in your wiki, and then attach weight surveys to the end of each module to test what they learned. Our most recent update gives you the option to display a contact’s missed questions if they fail a module, giving them a chance to review and learn from their mistakes.

Learn more about our LMS!

 

Workflows

A possible bottleneck in helping others is getting the people you're helping the resources they need quickly. When you add a new beneficiary to your program, you can assign workflows to their contact to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. Workflows are essentially a string of activities which can be assigned to different team members. This way, all your volunteers and care workers will be alerted when they need to check in or assist a new beneficiary. Workflows can also modify this contact’s record to update data fields or add them to the appropriate groups.

 

Conclusion

Let us help you help others! The same way communities need nonprofits to empower its citizens, NPOs need CRM to empower success. GreenRope harnesses the power of marketing automation and digital analytics so can fulfill your mission using fewer resources. Since it’s being offered free, you literally have nothing to lose!

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