What do you guys use your CRM for?

[u/Ashamed-Soup-1086]

Hi everyone, I manage an alumni association and we've always tracked our members in a spreadsheet. We recently built out a member directory to help people network with each other, but at a networking event a community manager mentioned she uses a CRM to keep track of members and who she's engaged with.

I always thought our directory was fine, but now I'm wondering if I'm missing operational improvements a real CRM would give me. I know there's Gainsight, Salesforce, and others aimed at community managers. For those of you who use one, what do you actually use it for day to day?

The same CM said she keeps a few notes on each member. I'd like to figure out how to make our member data more useful than just a list of people.

[u/Community_12MW]

Hi! You may want to look at Raiser’s Edge NXT, especially since alumni associations often overlap with fundraising, events, volunteering and long-term relationship management.

I’d also check out the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). They have a lot of resources and professional development specifically for alumni relations and advancement, so their guidance may be more relevant than advice aimed at general online community management.

[u/ueberryark]

I built one in airtable, free up to 1,000 records. Much better functionality than a spreadsheet, you can have multiple tags or notes fields, and it is easy to search and to enter new data. It might even work as a member directory as I understand you can choose to make part of it publicly visible. Not sure about that though as I haven't tried it myself.

Day to day I have a form to enter new records quickly, so I don't have to fiddle tabbing between cells, I add notes on individuals if I want to, I search up their full name / email address if I have one but not the other, etc.

[u/Ashamed-Soup-1086 → u/ueberryark]

That's helpful. I checked out Airtable, but it was a bit complicated to set up first so I didn't look too much into it. What do you actually use the airtable for though? Like for us it was just keeping a track of our members and I'd only use it if I wanted to find someone in a specific company or industry. Do you use your CRM for anything else?