Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) refers to both processes and technologies which help you to make, track, store information about, analyze, report on, and enhance relationships with your campaigns’ constituents. Typically, you will need a software solution to allow you to manage all of these relationships and interactions.

This brief primer gives an overview of CRMs, shows how they can be useful in a Climate Action campaign, and gives pointers to more information and some possible software solutions.

CRMs for action campaigns

There is a great deal of information about CRM on the Web. The most relevant information about CRMs for a municipal Climate Action campaign will likely come from resources intended for non-profits, who commonly work with volunteers, plan events, and solicit groups and individuals to take and report actions in line with the non-profit’s mission.

There are two excellent articles by Paul Hagen, geared toward non-profits’ use of CRMs and some solutions, here: http://www.idealware.org/articles/crm_constituents_processes.php
and here: http://www.idealware.org/articles/crm_software.php

He points out that, as you review the information about various CRM solutions, which usually speak to sales and marketing activities of for-profit businesses, it can be helpful to:

...think through your processes by breaking them into the components that the corporate world uses: Marketing (outreach), Sales (action), and Service. While at first glance the words may not seem to correspond to nonprofit operations, further inspection shows the striking similarity. Each constituent grouping has some kind of “Marketing”, “Sales”, and “Service” cycle, though efforts for each step will vary greatly and sometimes blend. – Paul Hagen, http://www.idealware.org/articles/crm_constituents_processes.php

While most of the CRM software products out there focus on sales and marketing applications, CRM applications are also very useful for managing campaigns with volunteers, events, and calls for action like your Climate Action Campaign.

What CRM can do for your Climate Action Campaign

With the proper CRM system in place, you'll be able to:

• Track and display individual citizens’ participation and actions taken, so that you can understand our campaign’s impact and use the information to guide your campaign;
• Help your city’s campaign participant citizens share information about the campaign and their participation with their friends, so that you can increase campaign participation and impact;
• Track and display participation and actions taken by neighborhood, so that you can increase campaign impact by encouraging inter-neighborhood competition and so that you can understand demographics of participants; and
  
• Help citizens and campaign participants see and share with others what actions they’ve taken, so that they can feel good about my efforts and encourage others to participate.

Specifically, you can use a CRM software system to:

• manage contact information
• record interactions with campaign constitutents like volunteers, partners, sponsors, and participants
• manage to-do lists for campaign staff
• create response reports for volunteer solicitations
• create lists for phone banks and email campaigns
• create mail-merges or integrate with common document editing applications
• record attendance at an event
• analyze effectiveness of campaign events and efforts
• manage volunteers and volunteer solicitations
• record actions taken by participants
• sort and analyze participation and actions taken by many types of categories and data sets
• track communication with participants and partners
• manage email and phone call campaigns
• display key data about your campaign on your website, either manually or automatically
• create target groups for campaign events or communications based on your criteria
• keep statistics and analyze trends associated with your campaign

CRM Software Choices

Your local government may already have a CRM solution in place. Find out if this is the case, and if so, who manages it. You may be able to get help to use the existing system to manage your campaign.

Web Hosting for CRM

Do you have an IT department which can host and deploy a CRM software solution for you?

If so, you have more options. Talk to someone in the IT department about which CRM software can work for your particular web-software setup.  For example, some CRM packages will work on Windows web servers, but some won't.

If not…
Investigate professional service organizations which provide hosted CRM applications. You might also engage with an outside service provide to help you install and self-host a CRM software package.  Also, some CRM software is sold only as a hosted service—Salesforce.com is a champion of this "Software as a Service" approach.

Our Software Recommendations

We recommend two free, open source software solutions (with paid support and hosting options) and one commercial option.

Free, open source.  Paid hosting options available.

"The Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector
CiviCRM is an open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. Integration with both Drupal and Joomla! content management systems gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents."

Additional plugins for donor management, event registration and participant tracking, email blasts, and newsletters, membership management

and search on the word 'host' to find service providers that will host your CRM for you and provide any needed professional assistance.

Runs on UNIX-based operating systems with Apache web server with MySQL and PHP.  Runs along with and requires one of two free, open source website content management systems (CMS):  Joomla or Drupal.

CiviCRM may be the most tailored to the types of campaigns similar to a Climate Action campaign, especially with its add-ons.  It does also have more restrictions in terms of necessary software—this makes the paid, hosted options more attractive and a good place to look if you want to get started without setting up your own web server infrastructure.   

Sugar CRM

Free, open source.  Commercial upgrades and paid hosting available.

SugarCRM handles all a wide variety of sales and marketing and collaboration automation tasks—these are detailed here: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/sugar-suite/components.html

You can install and manage the free software on your own servers, or use a hosted solution from Sugar.  Sugar offers two commercial options with support: one is hosted, and the other is support to host the CRM behind your own firewall:

• Hosted by Sugar, with support: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/sugar-on-demand.html  Prices start at $40/user/month (April 2009).  Free trials available.
  
• Hosted by you, with support and easy installation tools from Sugar: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/on-premise.html Prices start at $275/user/year (April 2009)

Runs on Windows or Unix-based systems using IIS or Apache webservers, MySQL, and PHP.

SugarCRM gives more flexibility in software if you want to host it yourself and some fairly inexpensive options for hosted solutions with small number of users, and is a powerful, extensible system.  Like CiviCRM, it has the benefit of great flexibility and control (when self-hosted) and a tool with a large base of users and developers continuing to make available for free their improvements and additions to the software.

Salesforce.com

http://www.salesforce.com

Commercial, properietary. 
Software as a Service (SaaS) : nothing to install. All web-based, always hosted by Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is a very widely used CRM and has a large user base among non-profits, since it gives away free subscriptions to 501(c)(3) organizations. 

Salesforce can be significantly more expensive, but may be worth it, particularly if you find it will have application beyond just the Climate Action campaign.

You will likely need at least Professional Edition, to get the campaign management, list management, and mass email features. Pro Edition is priced at $780/user/year (April 2009). If you find you do need just core CRM features, then Group Edition may work for you, which is $99/user/year (April 2009).  Free trials are available.

Salesforce.com also offers special packages and set-ups tailored to government:
http://www.salesforce.com/industries/public-sector/

With Salesforce.com, you are locked into one vendor, but they have a solid set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) so that you can retrieve and manipulate your data with all kinds of different custom applications you might require, and a very powerful CRM system.