Think about the ways that you gather information about customers and donors. Are you receiving contact information via email? Do you have a form on your site, the data from which you are entering into a spreadsheet? Are people actually filling out pieces of paper at your events?
Those are the old ways. Let us tell you about the new way, which will make life much easier not only for you, but for your constituents.
First, you need a CRM (customer relationship management) system in place — for example, Salesforce.
Salesforce is an extremely powerful tool that allows people in your organization to view information about customers, donors, partners, prospects and more at a glance. You simply enter the data about the person or organization and it’s all easily searchable and accessible. You can integrate your financial systems, your inventory management, your email campaigns, you name it, into Salesforce, too.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have contact and other information for your constituents automatically entered into Salesforce? It’s possible! Having said that, you don’t want to give people outside the organization access to Salesforce, because it contains all of your privileged information.
How do you get that data into the system, without exposing your CRM to outsiders, but ALSO without any of your employees lifting a finger? The answer: Mobile portals.
Mobile portals are essentially web pages that connect on the back end to Salesforce. You create a form that allows the customer, donor, volunteer, partner or other constituent to enter all of the information you’d like them to. You can create all kinds of fields — as many as you’d like. Then, at an event using a laptop or kiosk or, more frequently, on your website, you can present this form digitally to visitors.
That’s when the magic happens.
All of the data the user enters into those fields on the form are mapped to the appropriate fields in your Salesforce. There are some cool “middleman” apps that allow this to occur, securely.
Now, ALL of that data either turns into a new contact or account record, or is fed into an existing record. Automatically.
We’ve designed mobile portals for hundreds of businesses and nonprofits. We can design one — or more — for your organization. Drop us a line and let’s talk about portals!