Social Networking meets CRM

What does Social Networking have to do with Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)?

Here are a couple of examples nonprofits are working on:

1) A health advocacy organization set up a Ning site to support collaboration and knowledge sharing among like-minded organizations. The site has grown to about 300 members and is the single largest source of “new blood” into the collaborative effort. However, in order to ensure that all the Ning members get the monthly eNewsletter and announcements of important events from Constant Contact, the organization has to cut and paste every new registrant into its database and again into Constant contact.

2) A volunteer organization decided to create “snaggable” widgets that would allow volunteers to post their own data about volunteering on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, or blogs. The organization believes this would create much more visibility amongst the volunteers’ friends and family than trying to attract traffic to its original volunteer portal idea. The trick, exposing the volunteer data and messaging through widgets or mini-Open Social applications.

The takeaway message: Social networking tools are merely new mechanisms that need to share data just like any other tools. If you’re delving into social networking, keep asking how you’ll manage the data and communications relative to other tools that you’re using for fundraising, events, and day-to-day interactions. Look for ecosystems in which multiple vendors work together.

I looked at the Ning site and was pleased to see that it had a decent and well-documented API that will allow the organization to automatically gather new registrant data into an open database like Salesforce, CiviCRM, or Convio. Convio, Kintera, and Salesforce among others have started to develop social networking widgets for activities like fundraising and advocacy campaigns that feed data back into their respective repositories. These kinds of ecosystems are great!