You’ve probably heard of the CRM tool for associations, but you don’t know what it really means!

Before we explain the reasons to adopt a CRM, let’s start at the beginning. First, an association is defined as an agreement by which two or more people pool their knowledge or activities on a permanent basis for a purpose other than sharing profits.

In this article, we will discuss the interest of choosing a CRM for your association through various questions:

• How to define a CRM?
• What are the uses of a CRM in general?
• What will be the advantages of a CRM for your association?
• How to make a CRM work?
• Graphical representation of a CRM for association

How to define a CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management.

Customer management is a set of tools most often used within a company to ensure good management, to support marketing campaigns and to monitor the relationship with its customers and potential customers with responsiveness. It is an information system for customer management thanks to a single database, and therefore customer follow-up to identify their specific needs.

As such, relationship tools bring together all the databases of your organization and allow you to manage customer satisfaction and have the best customer knowledge.

What are the uses of a CRM in general?

Within a company, the purpose of setting up a relationship tool is to centralize customer data in order to examine it. For each customer, customer relationship management will archive customer information data such as their last name, first name, date of birth, address, email, however the most interesting are the key data such as their purchase frequency, purchase history, etc. The CRM program is intuitive to use, so it is easy to use, even when the number of users on a daily basis is high.

In the CRM market, the most frequently used are Salesmate CRM, Zoho, Hubspot, and Salesforce. We advise you to make a comparison before making your decision in order to know which management software suits you best.

If you develop business management, contact management must be thought out, this will allow for better targeting during communication campaigns and personalized marketing operations because the data present in the CRM makes it possible to identify needs and expectations with customer follow-up. You will also be able to get to know your market better and therefore target the most interesting prospects. Implementing CRM software is a technical support to manage new customers, and in general all customer relationship management.

Therefore, by being more of a customer support and thanks to the synchronization of your customers’ requests, you will be able to create loyalty based on customer management.

This integrated management of customer data is suitable for all sizes of companies, large companies but also VSEs and SMEs.

What will be the advantages of a CRM for your association?

After analyzing the usefulness of a CRM in business, we will examine the advantages of a CRM for your association.

The notable dissimilarity with an associative CRM is that it will collect data on members and not on customers, because an association offers services and not goods.

However, the purposes are almost identical, because the purpose of the data will then be to communicate with members, retain donors and also maintain all the members of the association.

The management of volunteers with the CRM allows the association to be able to meet its objectives that it sets for itself.

On a daily basis, associations must do financial management by ensuring that there is no reduction in public subsidies, management of competition, administrative management with the recruitment of new volunteers, resource planning with donations, etc.

In addition, it is not only customer relationship management but a general concern of all the stakeholders of the association, which is now called Community Relationship Management.

How to make a CRM work?

In order to present the functioning of a CRM for an association, we have chosen the case in a sports association.

Data collection to a CRM

As we presented earlier, the main function of CRM will be to gather the data of users, either of a company or of an association, in order to identify their expectations and then communicate with them. As an association, when a new member joins the association, recording their personal information is crucial for your CRM and for the rest of the future data.

However, when registering, make sure that you comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, i.e. you cannot ask your new members questions that are considered confidential.

Previously, when registering for an association, the volunteer had to complete a membership document in writing by sending a cheque for the membership fees. Then, once the documents were retrieved, paper dashboards were created or the data was entered into an Excel dashboard.

Even if you opt for a simple CRM, you won’t have to do this work by hand anymore.

Let’s start the case for a sports association that has a CRM, when registering your member will be able to register directly online using the internet. Once the information has been filled in and transmitted, it will be instantly visible on your CRM site.

Automating this tool saves time to manage the follow-up and in addition you reduce the risk of error when creating dashboards. All information is digitized, so you don’t risk losing your data.

The management of members is done instantly and reduces the risk of misconduct, the data can be modified for example when a payment is made, when a member arrives or leaves, etc.

You can also ask your members to send a medical certificate or any other important document. The member will have the possibility to deposit his certificate digitally on the site. Immediately you will find the document on the CRM software that will complete the data of the member of your association.

If you manage a good CRM, hence the interest in doing your research well in advance, you will be able to associate the money payments for registration immediately with the member database. The history of payment of money for registration will be directly added to the data of each member.

How to handle CRM data

The history of the CRM will be essential for you to observe fluctuations in financial resources and also to consult the information of your members, it is a real complete management module. How can we take advantage of data?

• Tracking of money transfers: the fact of tracking members’ payments allows you to accredit contributions and allows you to know who made the transfer? , by what means? , at what time? , and who is late in payment? For example, if you are aware of a delay, you will be able to send reminders to the late parties
• Targeted emailing: your CRM will allow you to identify their expectations, which will lead to very targeted personalization, so you will be able to send them content that meets their requests. Targeting your communication will be possible thanks to CRM. For example, depending on the level of your members in the discipline you will be able to offer them adapted competitions, and also when newcomers to the association they can receive personalized EMails broadcast only for newcomers
• History of your association: your history is archived, so you know your activity from A to Z, for example what is the percentage of members who participated in the big tournament? Who hasn’t played tournaments? So many streams of information that will be listed on your CRM.

Of course, the use of the software was intended to help mainly companies, but as an organization, associations realize that the management of their activity is significantly improved. While knowing that you still need to have a good command of this tool!

Enter CRM in 10 seconds

The CRM can be distributed among the members of the association regarding its accessibility. In the case of the sports association, simple members will have access only to the site, and the creators of the association will also have access to the mailbox on the administrative side.

The data is of course protected and secured. In addition, the inconveniences of losing or having documents on paper and Excel stolen will no longer exist.

No need to take a duplicate of the membership file with you when you travel, your information is directly accessible from anywhere the device is connected, however only by the managers of the associative CRM.