A few days ago I went to see Jacqui O'Beirne from the Dogs Trust. Jacqui is almost certainly familiar to many of you as a veteran of the social media conference circuit, as Dogs Trust are leaders in the pack (pardon the pun) when it comes to their consistent and effective use of digital. This was officially recognised when they won the Charity Times' Best use of the Web award a few weeks back.
However, what really impressed me about what their doing over at DT Towers is not the tweetage, nor the Eating Poo training videos, nor any of the other exciting digital surprises they have waiting in the wings, but something much more boring. As Jacqui explained, Dogs Trust are in the enviable position of having a bespoke, one-stop shop and hugely powerful customer-related marketing (CRM) system built and managed internally by a dedicated team.
That dreaded word - integration. What does it really mean? Throughout my time at Breast Cancer Care and before that at various other charities, we grappled with eCRM or, more usually, the lack of it.
Now, working at Enable, I have even more visibility of a whole range of organisations that are either trying to shoehorn various legacy databases together, or spending loads on building bespoke application programming interfaces (APIs) for Raiser's Edge, or even (worst case) buying a dedicated content management system (CMS) from a CRM supplier.
This inevitably leads to internal friction: does your digital strategy lead your CRM, or vice versa? Or should the two be developed concurrently?
Also, it defines how digital maps out across the organisation. If your website is ultimately a service-delivery tool, should you be beholden to gear yourself to being a transactional front-end for your donors? Ideally, of course, you should be able to do it all, but complex legacy systems, processes and tight budgets often make this very hard to achieve.
At Dogs Trust they are very clear: the website is a transactional supporter tool mainly for online fundraising, although their online Rehome a Dog scheme is also hugely successful.
Absolutely everything is integrated seamlessly with a whole bunch of intelligent and automated supporter care built into the system. They even have the dog database available for cross-reference, so every time a new dog is brought into a regional centre, the centre staff just update the same central system, which has web-specific fields that update the live site instantly.
Now I'm not suggesting that in-house, bespoke systems are the way forward. I'm sure the level of investment made by Dogs Trust was substantial, but equally I imagine the ROI is now pretty impressive too.
It won't work for everyone, but surely it is leaps ahead of the gaffer-tape-and-fingers-crossed approach that seems to be endemic in so many other charities.
I don't know; I'm not a techie, certainly not a data expert, but I come up against these frustrations so often that I suspect there must be other people out there who are slowly but surely cracking it by bridging the divide between digital and CRM.
If so, I'm sure the Because community would love to hear from you, so please do get in touch either by commenting on this post or contacting our editor to write your own.
Wow. Never thought I'd get so worked up about such a dry subject. I need to get out more...
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