What is CiviCRM?
CiviCRM, specifically designed for non-profits like associations, empowers them to actively track their relationships with members and other stakeholders through its open-source customer relationship management (CRM) solution. There are many CRMs available and they all vary in their functionality and limitations. They have the reputation of being one of the most robust CRMs available for associations because of their wealth of functionality, flexibility, and ability to create any amount of content types and custom fields and tags.
CiviCRM Connects to Your Member Portal and Website
They are your one-stop-shop to store all of your association’s information; your membership types, member info, prospects, board members, volunteers, events, sponsorship, payments — you name it, you can store it there.
Its power lies in its seamless integration with your website and member portal, enabling prospects to interact with lead magnets on your site and members to access and engage with their benefits on the portal, while it captures all data and activity. This makes for detailed data that you can mine for powerful reports, and impactful marketing and financial decisions.
CiviCRM Streamlines All Association Communication
Use CiviCRM to communicate with all your external stakeholders (such as members, prospects, partners, donors, etc). You can search your database with any number of detailed search criteria you want to send appropriate and relevant communication. Better yet, use it for your association’s internal communications with your team as well. It eliminates the need for other communication software and keeps everything centralized in one place.
CiviCRM At Work For Your Association
CiviCRM offers multilingual support; this is great for a multilingual team and membership. They can manage fundraising campaigns and email marketing to manage your donations. Keeping track of members, events, contacts, cases (i.e., support requests), and all other data becomes easy.
Saving Time and Money with CiviCRM
Having it as a central hub for your association’s data enhances productivity, and data accuracy and eliminates duplicate and outdated records. Additionally, organizing saves your association time and enables you to move faster by aggregating data.
Is CiviCRM Easy to Use?
This is a good question. Here is our answer: Is a car easy to use? Is a cell phone easy to use? Once you learn, it’s easy. For a newbie, a helpful hand goes a long way. Once your association’s team receives training and pointers, they will be capable of performing the tasks they desire – and even discovering new tasks they didn’t realize they could accomplish! At our company, we teach you how to use your it as it relates to all the functionality you want to perform with your member portal.
More Functionality than You Realize!
In truth, there are so many ways that CiviCRM can customize and optimize your particular association’s data that it is possible your association’s team wouldn’t come across how to get maximum results without more detailed support and exploration. There are training programs out there to get the most out of the platform.
Main Features of CiviCRM That Help Associations
- Peer-to-peer fundraisers
- Track donations to your association
- Association events
- Advocacy campaigns
- Case management (i.e. a ticketing system to resolve issues)
- Membership
- Contact Management
- Communications
Top 6 Benefits of CiviCRM for Association
1. It is Highly Customizable
You can create as many content types, tags, groups, and categories as you can think of. Furthermore, your staff will be able to search and sort your data into any number of specific subgroups. Additionally, you can save those groups and even create smart groups that auto-populate with new data that meets the criteria of the smart group.
2. Easy Centralized Data Storage
The main benefits of CiviCRM for associations are easy data recording, centralized data storage, and multilingual support. This is super beneficial for an association that is looking to stay with their CRM software long-term and avoid making expensive and time-consuming system transitions.
3. Track Communication and Encourage Engagement
CiviCRM is a powerful web-hosted CRM so your team can safely store all your data in one place and easily access it from anywhere. It is your association’s address book, event planner and communications record with your members, stakeholders, and partnering organizations. You can use CiviCRM to send marketing emails and encourage your contacts to engage with your site, and your benefits, and give donations. CiviCRM has a dedicated Activity feature that allows your association to track all the interactions and activities your association staff has with your members and stakeholders. It also allows you to create custom activities with custom data fields so you can collect the data that is specific to your association and relevant to your members.
4. It’s Free
CiviCRM is free! Notably, it is an open-source solution, which means there are no licensing costs or fees for downloading and installing the software. Additionally, you may need to hire a consultant to teach you how to use it, integrate it with your customized member portal for easy data collection, or pay a hosting charge.
Moreover, the only ongoing cost for associations is a small monthly fee for managing the system, security measures, and ongoing maintenance. Furthermore, CiviCRM comes with integration with Drupal and Joomla, which saves development costs with other CRM products.
5. Internal Task Management for Your Team
CiviCRM can be used to assign and track work assigned to your team, functioning much like a ticketing project management system. Moreover, use the Activities feature to allocate a task to any teammate, and you can monitor the progress of the task. Additionally, every member will have a customized dashboard, which will include in the display a list of activities assigned to them.
6. Highly Secure
Even though web-based software may make some of us uneasy, worry not about CiviCRM. Specifically, security is a major concern for the sensitive data collected by associations. Furthermore, CiviCRM has built-in security features for securing the server to prevent unauthorized attempts to access your data.
Additionally, you have the ability to assign access roles to users and change file permission to provide limited access to confidential information. Moreover, it is protected against a wide variety of hacking techniques.
CiviCRM Integrations for Data Sharing
- The following CiviCRM integrations are currently offered:
- Drupal
- WordPress
- JotForm
- Webform
- JustGiving
- Click & Pledge
- MailChimp
Is CiviCRM the Right Choice for Your Association?
CiviCRM is free, powerful, versatile, and boasts more features than high-cost CRM systems. It stores all your association’s data in one web-based place for your team to access from anywhere. You can use the data to create insightful reports such as creating targeted marketing campaigns, reaching out to members at risk, and tracking member benefit engagement. If your team is tired of spending time and money working on multiple software platforms and ready to centralize your work in one place, CiviCRM may be a good for for your association.
How do I get started and get the most out of our CiviCRM?
Whether you already have CiviCRM and want to get the most out of it, or if you are interested in transferring your data to CiviCRM, set up a call with us. We would be happy to see how we can help.
Book a CiviCRM Demo
We are a CiviCRM partner with 12 years of experience with CiviCRM and member portal integration. We offer CiviCRM demos, scheduled for your team at your convenience. Book a call now
