Managing Your Contacts Using the CRM

Before Starting

The Contacts feature allows you to manage your CRM. This is a database of all the people your nonprofit interacts with.

Below, its main functions will be presented. Links to other articles will also be included for further explanations.

This article covers the following points: 

• Discovering the contacts feature
• Main functions
• Settings

Discovering the Contacts Feature

Main Idea

The community feature can be found under Community > Contacts. It provides an overview of all the people who are in your CRM, presenting them in a table. Here, you can also find:

• All the information that is stored on your contacts 
• Access to their profiles 
• Their status (donor, member, etc.) 

How It Works

The Contacts page allows you to easily access your contacts and their information. From this page you can:

• Manage your community, by adding or archiving contacts. You can also modify their information, status or add them to groups 
• Search for a particular person using the different search bars and filters 
• Contact by mail all of your contacts

You can personalize your CRM as much as you want/need by creating groups and your own information fields.

Main Functions

Managing Your Contacts 

You can easily add members and fill out their information. You can add them individually or multiple at a time by importing an Excel file.

If there is no need to keep a contact in your community, for example an old donor, you can archive them, which reduces your number of contacts (this number determines your subscription fee).

If needed, you can segment your community by adding contacts to groups. This allows you to identify this groups of contacts quickly, and use their specific features (sending emails, attendance sheets, etc.).

Searching for a Person 

Contacts are shown in batches of 50 lines, and up to 1,000 can be shown (in order to not slow down browsers). Because of this, you will probably want to only show the contacts you are interested in.

For this, three methods are available:

• Filter by type of  contact or by group
• Search
• Refine your search using the multi-criteria filter 

These tools show the people whose profiles contain information that meet the search criteria entered.

Contacting Your Community

From the Contacts page, you can easily and quickly send emails to the contacts you choose.

You can filter or search your contacts using the methods mentioned above, in order to target your messages to specific people.

Settings

To parameter your CRM, head over to Community > Settings. Here you can define how your contacts will be identified (which unique user ID your CRM will use) and which information will be collected on your contacts (through information fields).

Choosing the Unique User ID

The unique user ID aims to identify and differentiate your contacts between themselves. It is therefore a piece of information that must be present and unique to each person.

You have the choice between different methods:

• The email, practical unless several contacts share the same one
• Springly ID, a flexible method based on an automatically generated number by the software
• An information field, that you will create and select as unique user ID

Creating Personalized Information Fields

The software automatically proposes 8 information fields by default to fill your profiles. You can create your own information fields in order to collect more information based on your needs.

Once defined on the page Community > Settings, these fields can be used in all the forms (whether it be for signing up for a membership, donation, event, store purchase, or on any registration page).