CRM requirements for SoFAN

Network Members Hall
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Below I attempt to sketch out the current CRM requirements for SoFA Network. This is a working draft, which means that it is starting as my understanding, and I envision updating it as Website Circle continues its discussion and processes feedback (which you could provide here, or submit to us via other channels). For reference, our current CRM is Groundhogg.

For ease, I’m not going to include what I consider to be basic, common CRM requirements. Let me know if you think it would be important for me to enumerate these explicitly.

Current CRM requirements:

  • ability to compose attractive emails
  • track and respect GDPR status of contacts
  • custom fields for contacts (including the ability to populate these fields from flows)
  • associate contacts into groups
  • custom fields for contact groups (including the ability to populate these fields from flows)
  • segmented ownership of contacts?
  • automation (called funnels in Groundhogg 3, flows in Groundhogg 4)
  • reporting and visualizations
  • activity tracking; engagement history
  • creating forms
  • ACLs and permissions

In an expanded view of a CRM, these requirements include:

  • tracking membership history, particularly non-profit membership status
  • processing donations
  • event management
  • product management
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This list is missing automations, which is a really important component of what we are using and one of the reasons we shifted away from HubSpot, which was going to be too expensive to maintain with the automations feature.

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Thanks for the reminder about that, CJ. Would you be willing to provide a couple of examples of the ways that we currently use the automations feature, to help illustrate it for us? When you say automations, do you mean what Groundhogg refers to as flows (and formerly as funnels)?

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I met with @nplanchon on July 17 in order to explore his perspective on what we need from a CRM. I learned that, going into that conversation, his perspective on what functionality is included in a CRM was more expansive than mine. Neil sees event management and product sales as all included in the CRM, because they are each intimately involved in our relationships with our customers. I have updated my original post to include features like this that Neil mentioned in this conversation.

So some of Neil’s frustrations with Groundhogg as our current CRM are:

  • Groundhogg, event management, and product management are not tightly integrated with each other. In particular, this loose integration makes it difficult to find event and product engagement-related information and produce reports about those elements of customer engagement.
  • The Groundhogg UI is clunky, including the flow and tag UI. Elements of the UI feel too busy in some places.
  • The admin console responsivity/performance is poor.

Are there things you would add to this report, Neil?

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Yes, Flows/Funnels

They are used for our membership flow, automated tagging through quizes and placement tests, newsletter signup (which doesn’t have to be automated via automations like that, depending), etc. Basically anything that has a flow/funnel.

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