July 23rd, 2010
The NCVO has just released the Third Sector Foresight report “What will membership be like in 5 years time?“. The report identifies major drivers that will impact membership organisation over the next 5 years and beyond:
changing sources of identity
changing attitudes to money and consumerism
increasing availability of free information
the rise of the social web
changing expectations of participation
the commodification of membership
There are some interesting pointers to how these challenge current models of membership, suggested next steps and a case study.
It provides a useful starting point for thinking strategically about the impact of the drivers on membership models, engagement … and business and IT changes.
See also - the blog by Katherine Hudson, one of the authors and member of the NCVO Third Sector Foresight team.
Tags: business change, business strategy, IT, membership organisation, NFP
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July 20th, 2010
It can be difficult to decide when it is the right time to deploy an Intranet, particularly because of the hype that surrounds the topic. As in most cases, it is more helpful to look at the benefits to the business rather than be swayed by the hype.
The main business advantages come when a company or organisation is large enough that some of the following are useful (typically when you don’t know everyone in the company, or there are shift patterns / geographical spread):
directory lookup including more than just the Active Directory type information, listing areas of expertise, etc
news group / forum type features for sharing expertise or solving problems
information resources that are updated relatively frequently, such as HR, quality system, standard purchasing list (there can be a problem here of staff not being aware of the latest HR policy though)
useful applications, perhaps a purchasing system with workflows, linked to the purchasing list
where some internal communications are relevant to a subset of the staff (perhaps a division or special interest group); it can be more helpful to have this available on a “pull” basis by the user, rather than a “push” email to all
email summaries can be sent at user selectable intervals of what’s new and what’s changed with the detail on linked pages
as an extension to document sharing, particularly when SharePoint is used
Considering these can avoid investing in a white elephant that no one looks at.
Tags: business strategy, intranet, IT
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June 29th, 2010
Clay Shirky launched his new book “Cognitive Surplus
” at the LSE yesterday evening (also available: podcast and video). The “Cognitive Surplus” comes from a combination of the increase in free time since the mid 1900s and the recently developed medium for coordinated action.
This follows “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together
” which is one of the seminal texts for the impact of social media on society.
As well as presenting some excellent material from his book, I found him a very engaging speaker. His main theme (amongst a fair few) was that digital communications and social media is providing opportunities for previously unmet social/psychological needs. So, it has provided opportunities for example, to counter attacks on Indian women considered by right-wing activists to be behaving inappropriately.
He suggested categories of opportunities:
Communal - there are numerous examples of communities of people with common interests sharing photos, jokes, etc.
Public, such as Wikipedia.
Civic - where there could be significant impact on our culture, such as political opposition and moves to much more openness in medical records.
Among his examples, conclusions and suggestions were:
It has taken 100 million hours of effort so far to create Wikipedia. This may seem large, but the US population consumes more hours of TV commercials than this in a weekend.
The power of brands will decline significantly.
Marketing and communications professionals need to switch from their current approach of either being in broadcast mode (advertising) or receiving mode (research), to a far more conversational approach.
In the third world, mobile is far more important than PCs, so incorporating SMS into solutions needs serious consideration.
Tags: online communities, social media
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June 24th, 2010
A very interesting slide set - Cultivating knowledge through Communities of Practice - from Steve Dale, the information architect for the award winning local government “Community Hub” online community. He sets out the fundamentals for setting up and encouraging Communities of Practice and the different ways of sharing and developing knowledge.
The presentation takes is business-focused (rather than IT-focused), looking at the methods and roles to get successful Communities.
Tags: business strategy, charity, knowledge, membership organisation, NFP, online communities
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June 9th, 2010
SharePoint is a popular choice for Intranets, and with the release of SharePoint 2010, is likely to become even more popular.
There have, however (in common with other areas of IT), been some expensive failures.
With this in mind, there is some useful advice in Jacob Nielsen’s latest article “Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?“, particularly the need to carefully consider the needs of the target audience.
Tags: business change, IT, usability
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May 28th, 2010
There have been some interesting announcements by Microsoft on its Dynamics CRM product and additions it is making for the charity sector.
See:
Microsoft announcement for US and Canada
NFP Techno article giving more details
Civil Society article confirming UK release
Tags: charity, CRM, NFP
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April 1st, 2010
Today’s high court injunction blocking the strike by RMT signallers was due to inaccuracies in the database they used for polling members. As reported in the Telegraph, there were “serious inaccuracies in the RMT ballot” with problems including votes taken from 11 signal boxes that no longer exist and 23 signal boxes left out of the vote.
The RMT’s defence was that the union had gone to considerable lengths to ensure the accuracy of the database, but this argument was obviously not convincing to the judge, who ruled out any appeal.
The implication is that if the errors are not corrected, then repeat ballets would also be ruled unlawful, so there may not be a rapid fix to their problems.
This is a high profile example of the cost of data integrity problems, but similar problems cost many businesses and organisations much more than they realise. Thomas Redman, a leading expert on data quality, estimates that poor-quality data costs organisations about one-fifth of their revenue.
To tackle these problems, organisations need to ensure they have regular management reports of data quality measures, together with business processes for making improvements to the integrity of their databases.
Tags: CRM, IT
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March 26th, 2010
Our seminar on Wednesday was very well received, with three excellent speakers bringing views and insights on CRM from very different perspectives.
Abby Wright-Parkes of ACEVO talked about their recent experience of implementing a new database solution - an experience they’ve found very costly. She drew out a number of interesting points for NFPs: that CRM is about relationships, not data; don’t forget about relationships with people who don’t use computers; there is a need for fine tuning of communication preferences; and that it is vital to ensure the culture of the organisation is right for the new strategy and system.
Chris Jones from Remploy gave his conclusions from their experience of large scale business change, the key theme of which is to build a flexible scalable capability for them as a business. He highlighted two examples of where CRM has been introduced. The first was a technology led programme which has resulted in a system no one uses because the project didn’t engage with the business users to put the system into the context of the business strategy and how the system needed to work operationally. The second was a system (or actually a number of separate systems) that have grown organically in the operational departments. This has resulted in successful individual systems, but which are isolated and with no ability to aggregate the data or the processes.
Both of these really highlight the need to get the strategy right and to view the programme as a business change programme, rather than an IT project!
The final speaker was Dominic Monkhouse of Peer1, who brought an entertaining insight into customer service [relationship management] from the commercial world of managed hosting services. He again emphasised that it is about the culture within the organisation and potentially the need to confront and change that culture. He put forward two challenges around the theme of how can you deliver great service? The first is what can you offer. His examples here were that as UK MD, he gives his mobile number to all clients, and has only ever had four out of hours calls; and that making a very significant offer when things do go wrong has had a huge benefit to customer satisfaction, actually at marginal cost.
His second challenge was how to drastically reduce the amount of service provided, by giving great service, particularly by eliminating errors (that result in service calls) and providing excellent facilities for customers/users to find the answers they need so easily that they don’t need to call.
More information: white paper and presentations
Tags: business change, business strategy, charity, CRM, membership organisation, NFP
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March 2nd, 2010
Organisations are often faced with the dilemma of how to select their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and website CMS (Content Management System) - should they use the same supplier for both, with the promise of out of the box integration?
This is a dilemma we find quite a lot of people having and there isn’t a single answer that suits everyone.
The main problem is that organisations very rarely start with a “green field” - there are always legacy systems that have to be taken into account and the business case for change to be considered. This is the main reason why there isn’t one solution that suits everyone. If you have already made a considerable investment, there may not be a good commercial case for changing.
In general, membership system / donor system / CRM (I’ll refer to them collectively as CRMs) suppliers don’t provide very good website CMSs and certainly not systems with market leading facilities. So in most cases it doesn’t make sense to use the supplier of your CRM for your CMS.
It is generally better to use a best-of-breed CMS. There are some very good low cost and open source CMSs and a good range of companies, contractors and potential employees who can provide the implementation effort needed to build your website, content, and facilities for your forums, blogs, etc. There are a number of membership organisations and charities using the leading open source CMSs Drupal and Joomla! for example.
The other angle on this is that integrating your CRM with your website shouldn’t be too difficult - most CRMs and all CMSs worth considering should provide web services interfaces. If your CRM doesn’t provide web services, there are also alternative methods that can be used (and if this is an area of difficulty or significant cost, maybe its time to reconsider your CRM platform).
A more detailed question is - what data needs to be saved in the CRM and what can be kept in the website? In most cases, the answer is that data needed for managing relationships (with members and other stakeholders) should be in the CRM and other data can be in the website. So items such as name, contact details and areas of interest need to be in the CRM, and display preferences and forum postings in the website. This means that there is a relatively restricted amount of data that needs to be passed across the interface.
Related links:
Ready for real-time relationships? - the implications of “social CRM”
Advantages of using a Content Management System - reasons for using an off-the-shelf CMS
Seminar on 24th March 2010: Power to Your People: The Death and Rebirth of CRM
Tags: charity, CMS, CRM, integration, IT, NFP, website
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January 23rd, 2010
I was at an interesting event on Wednesday, hosted by not-for-profit (NFP) supplier Iris, debating the latest technology trends (as relate to the NFP sector).
The format was to write out your top prediction at the start. These were then all collated and debated, ending up with a vote. I was sat next to Social Media expert Steve Bridger and our contributions had a significant overlap - his was the rise of real-time computing; mine was on the increasing demands for personalisation, of content, and ultimately, of relationship.
The common ground here is real-time relationships - that in the world of Facebook, LinkedIn and especially Twitter, charity supporters and association members expect a personal conversation that is (near) real time and not constrained to office hours.
This type of relationship is a real challenge for NFP organisations, certainly for their software, but more importantly organisationally:
The best person to contribute to your side of the conversation is unlikely to be in marketing; they are much more likely to be “knowledge workers” in the research or professional development group
The working pattern (and HR) implications of the timing of the conversations
On the software side, the phrase “social CRM” has been coined in the last year or so and a number of the software vendors such as Oracle are responding. Its important to realise here though that this actually represents a huge mindset change for CRM - from “segment and conquer” to the personal conversation. This is likely to be much more manpower intensive. It is also much more about data assimilation and less about automated marketing.
We are running a seminar related to this posting in March: Power to Your People: The Death and Rebirth of CRM, hosted by Stephen Bubb, the Chief Executive of AVECO.
Tags: charity, CRM, membership organisation, NFP, social media
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