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:
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