CRM Specs
As Free Geek continues expanding its partnerships with the outside community, it has become necessary to have a system that can track these relationships in a consistent and measurable fashion - in other words, CRM Software. This proposal addresses the needs of such a system, how it could be utilized on an individual and organization-wide basis, the relative merits of such a system, and the steps necessary to implement it.
Vision
was an iphone app client an important feature? I remember this being mentioned as important in a conversation, though it wasn't put on this list. Ryan52 21:59, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
A fully-realized CRM system at Free Geek could be used to
- Track communications with outside organizations - send emails through software & track calls & meetings
- Identify opportunities for new relationships
- Identify relationships between individuals & organizations
- Run reports on donors, their donation history, our contact history and more
- Maintain a list of email templates
- Create and send the newsletter
- Build & execute email campaigns
- Maintain calendar of meetings, calls, pickups etc.
- Generate maps to route pickups
- Set reminders and alerts for contact-specific tasks
- Manage pricing tiers for pickup clients
- Track & manage hardware grant applications
- There is also functionality that would allow grant applicants to view the status of their application online
- Track tech support tickets
- While there may be no need to switch systems in tech support, it could be done, and would also allow customers to view the status of their repair online
- Track and manage online sales for the Thrift Store
This is a list of the fields that would ideally communicate between Free Geek's database and the CRM software. It would be best if changes made to the CRM overrode the database, except in the case of new contacts added to the DB.
contacts
- Organization - indicates that a contact is a business or organization
- It would be helpful for at least the CRM to indicate sub-categories of "non-profit" and "educational institution"
- Volunteer
- Student (see new fields)
- All name and address fields
- ID #
- Fully covered (this could be tied to a numeric field indicating number of employees, and automatically set based on the input)
- for automatically determining, I think this might be difficult to do in CRM software. It would be easy to add to fgdb, though. Ryan52 23:31, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
- Donation contract
- All phone, email & fax fields
- Notes
- Contributor
- Donor
- Pickup fee (new field)
donations
- All gizmo fields
New Fields
This is a partial list of new fields needed in CRM. As we begin to implement this software, more will likely make their necessity apparent.
- Pickup fee - a numeric field indicating the price we charge for pickups
- Educational Institution as a subfield of Organization
- Student - should be able to tie a student to a specific educational institution
Missing Functionality & Plug-Ins
As we are using the free (community) edition of SugarCRM, there are several pieces of functionality missing that would be helpful for our purposes. This is a list of missing functionality pieces and known plug-ins that would fill in those blanks.
- Reporting - CRM4Office OpenOffice
- Calendar - E-Calendar
- Maps - JJWDesign GoogleMaps
- Email - Agora Mail