You can’t have helped but notice that there is a lot of noise in the sector and the wider press at the moment about permission based marketing. There are lots of people making comments about whether new regulations, Codes of Practice and European Data laws are a good or bad thing and what they means for income, jobs and from my point of view, the most important people, our beneficiaries.
For example my wife mentioned to me in a comment recently, after attending a conference that a question was raised about “If Olive Cooke was alive today, would she have signed up for the Fundraising Preference Service” it does make you think….
So I thought that on a practical level the best thing that I could do would be to write a post about what all of this noise might mean in terms of CRM systems.
When I visit charities as part of my consultancy work I often find that their CRM systems are organic beasts. With changes in staff or business processes or sometimes both, over time, what used to be a lean and relevant system with clear procedures has become increasingly a long winded process that doesn’t easily meet the needs of the organisation’s current objectives.