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.

Its main functions will be presented in this article and links to other articles will be included for further explanations.

This article covers the following points: 

• Discovering the contacts feature
• Main functions: Manage, Search, Contact

Discovering the Contacts Feature

Main Idea

By accessing Community > Contacts, you can get an overview of all the people who are in your CRM, organized in just one table. Here, you can also:

• Access and edit each contact profile (Details column)
• Find detailed information about the purchases, memberships, and donations history 
• Identify their type of affiliation (donor, member, etc.) 

How It Works

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

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

You can personalize your CRM as much as you want by creating Groups as well as custom information fields.

Main Functions: Manage, Search, Contact

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 or delete them (more information here), so it reduces your number of contacts, which determines your subscription fee.

If needed, you can segment your community by adding contacts to groups. This allows you to identify these 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 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 send emails to the contacts you choose.

You can Filter or Search for your contacts using the methods mentioned above, in order to target your messages to specific people.