CRMs & You(r organisation)

Customer Relationship Management software packages (CRMs) are crucial to any modern organisation: keeping track of your client or supporter dialogue, allowing you to see the history of an individual or business interacting with yours, and providing everything you need for marketing, relationship management, and more.

How your CRM ties into your website can vary. 

It could be an embedded component where the user completes a form in an iframe, the CRM sucks up that data, and you don’t need to worry about anything else. 

Or a full-featured integration where every interaction with a known individual can be collected and fed into your CRM to improve your marketing, client communications, or to provide your customer with a quality bespoke supporter experience.

Most website CRM’s probably lie somewhere in between.

With various offerings on the CRM market, from big players like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Hubspot, to smaller products like CiviCRM, Beacon or RubiCRM, or sector-specific ones such as Engaging Networks or Raiser’s Edge, they all offer integrations at some level, allowing you to capture information from your website and store it in your customer/supporter database.

At Fat Beehive, we have experience of a huge range of CRMs, and we continue to grow our expertise in working with our clients to integrate to varying degrees.

Some clients favour a simple approach and will have a form embed: easily executed, most CRMs offer it as standard, and away we go.

Others require bespoke supporter areas to provide differing levels of information to various types of users, all of which needs to be stored or retrieved from their CRM. These require an API integration, knowledge of how all of this information intersects and interacts with the website and your user, and how to display it seamlessly on your website.

The right solution for you will be in part dictated by budget (more detailed integrations require more time), and by use-cases: if you’re just looking to capture payment information then simpler integrations are the way to go. 

But there’re so many possible custom-made features which can be implemented if you consider how you could utilise your data to full effect…

• do you want to limit content to certain users? 
• would you like to show specific journeys based on user type, both new and current? 
• capture donations and form submissions but also other data types that a form wouldn’t handle (eg a supporter has returned to your site or someone downloaded a resource)
• the possibilities are endless!

Whatever your CRM integration requirements, be it for an existing charity website or a new build, we at Fat Beehive can help you get your CRM really working for you.

Read more about CRM Integration and Members Areas