Implement Web Based Customer Relationship Management System

Implement Web Based Customer Relationship Management System

Priority: 
A - High
Open
Implement a set of Drupal modules called CiviCRM. It is an Open
Source thing, and in theory, the major benefit is that we would have a
single platform for management of content and of customers. The drawback
is that it there is not a lot of support available for that piece of
software, and there is not a lot of understanding of what it does and
what it doesn't. We would have to hire professional services from day
one to help us scope the project, and then more for implementation,
training, et cetera.  There are some cases we can refer to in order to
get a better understanding of this software - the Green Party uses it,
for example, and I believe that other nonprofits are also using it. My
impression (and it's just an opinion - I may be wrong) is that if we had
unlimited resources, this would be a good option.
Tags: 

Comments

I worked with a CRM software the last 3 years and it is a very powerful tool (the one I used holds complex information of thousands of travel agencies around the world).

In my experience, tech support is essential.

Hi Anne. Thank you for opening this up.

I had started a discussion with Adrian about this. I am glad that you are interested in the matter.

I would like to review this To Do Item in collaboration with you, to verify if it needs rewording.

To start with, I am not sure wether CiviCRM is the best solution to solve the problem. We have other options that are less costly, such Salesforce.com or Zoho.com .

I suggest that we change this task to "Implement Web Based Customer Relationship Management System".

I believe that it will cost about $ 10,000 dollars to do that with Salesforce - but I also think that we can do it with 5,000, if training is not an issue. With CiviCRM it's more in the range of 20,000.

If you can get that sort of money to the budget of your portfolio, we can think of doing something like that next year. I am not sure if the budget conversation will happen again this year (usually Liz asks about it before the beggining of he financial year), but you can have a conversation with her to see what can be done for the next financial year (from July).

May I change the description of the task?

Hey Andre - yes Adrian had sent me your discussion, hense me loading it. Yes, change the description to a more relevant one - all good. As far as funding/budget, maybe that's something we need to put together for the digital strategy funding - please remember I'm new to the Exec, so this is a new process for me.

I personally haven't used any of these systems. Will the training your suggesting be for setup or to use the system once setup?