CRM for Small Association

Sebastien
Member

Posted 02-Nov-2004 03:06 AM
Hi Jay,

I am the membership administrator of the European chapter of an American professional Association.

We are three people here in the UK and we deal with about three hundred members and two hundreds prospects. Our computers run on Windows and we use Outlook as the way to keep track of the correspondence we have got with them. Our members/prospects relationship is unprofessional and ineffective. Moreover we have got cabinets filed with tons of paper.

We want to change that, therefore would you be kind enough to advise me on what is the methodology to select an CRM software and to give me a list of people, who would suit our needs, I should contact.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards.

Sebastien

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 03-Nov-2004 08:39 AM
[Posted for Jay Curry]

Sebastien,

Since you are heavily into Outlook/Microsoft, you may want to look at the Microsoft CRM package. The company to implement it may be ePartners, the largest Microsoft reseller in the USA who now has a UK office in London. They have the expertise to help you.

Regards.

Russell Lack
Member

Posted 21-Apr-2005 08:41 AM
Sebastien

I'm responding to a thread that's now rather old. If your Association is still looking for a CRM product that is ideally suited to membership-driven organisations then you might like to take a look at SuperOffice.
The website is www.superoffice.co.uk

They have a web collaboration tool called Audience which has won quite a few awards and allows SuperOffice CRM users to invite external users to share CRM data via a webspace.

Hope this is useful.

Russell Lack

CS
Member

Posted 13-Apr-2006 11:53 AM
Good afternoon,
I have a question for you along the same lines as Sebastien.
I am the membership manager for an international trade association. We have about 17,000 member, and 92 chapters worldwide. We have recently contracted Protech and hope to launch this new CRM system in September.
Our marketing and IT departments are in a chess match currently, over whether or not Protech's CRM has email capabilities that will be sufficient. Our marketing department has currently brought in ExactTarget. Would you suggest purchasing an additional email software program to enhance the features of Protect?
Thank you for your advice.
Sincerely,
CS

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 19-Apr-2006 03:18 PM
[Posted for Jay Curry]

Dear CS,

I do not have personal experience with ProYech or ExactTarget but I do know Microsoft CRM, the ProTech technical platform.

On the face of it, I think Protech/Microsoft should be robust enough for normail e-mail operations. But your situation may not be normal, See for yourself—ask ExactTarget if you can "rent" their application for a pilot/testing project based on a representtive sample of your member base.

By the way, the "chess match" between marketing and IT may be a symptom of a larger unresolved issue: who is in charge of CRM operations in your association.

Good luck!

Jay Curry
Jay Curry Associates