Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)
Songwift can help you get a firm grip on managing the most fundamental aspect of your business or organization -- your customers, clients and constituents. Whether you are a business owner relying on customer sales, or a member of a non-profit foundation tracking donations and membership, the Open Source CRM solution we provide will give you a cost-efective tool set placing your business CRM functionality at the same level as many Fortune 500 companies.
What is Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)?
Constituent relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments.
Phases
The three phases in which CRM support the relationship between a business and its customers are to:
- Acquire: CRM can help a business acquire new customers through contact management, selling, and fulfillment.
- Enhance: web-enabled CRM combined with customer service tools offers customers service from a team of sales and service specialists, which offers customers the convenience of one-stop shopping.
- Retain: CRM software and databases enable a business to identify and reward its loyal customers and further develop its targeted marketing and relationship marketing initiatives.
Benefits of CRM
The use of a CRM system will confer several advantages to a company:
- Quality and efficiency
- Decreased costs
- Decision support
- Enterprise agility
CiviCRM
CiviCRM is a group of open source software modules that fall under the broad rubric of customer relationship management. It is specifically designed for the needs of non-profit, non-governmental, and advocacy groups, and designed to enable them to manage information about volunteers, activists, and donors, as well as more general sorts of business contacts such as employees, clients, or vendors. Its separate modules provide for keeping records relating to contributors (CiviContribute), events (CiviEvent), member lists (CiviMember) as well as the generation of emails and bulk mailings (CiviMail) and the generation of operating reports (CiviReport). The license for the current version is the GNU AGPL 3.
CiviCRM may be deployed alongside Drupal and Joomla! content management systems (CMS) and is supported by many hosting and professional services companies. Both the Drupal and Joomla! professional associations use CiviCRM. The upcoming CiviCRM version 3.4 will support new versions of Drupal (7.0) and Joomla (1.6).
CiviCRM is used by many large NGOs including Amnesty International, Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. There are also cases of very large record sets being used with one company claiming to have set up CiviCRM with a set of over 3 million constituents. CiviCRM is also used by Kabissa to provide CRM capabilities to over 1,500 organizations, mostly in Africa.
CiviCRM development is hosted at SourceForge, where it is "project of the month" for January, 2011.
