Back row: Tina Campbell-Drew and Jenny Westcott from Milton Keynes Play Association, Jo Green from Safety Centre, Matt Cove from SuperOffice, Becky Lawrence from Bridgebuilder Trust. Front row: Paul Griffiths from YMCA, Andy Coaten from Community Housing Action, Gill Bull Mott from Bridgebuilder Trust.

Thank you to everyone who came along today for our very first Peer to Peer Learning session on the theme of CRM systems for voluntary sector groups.

We were incredibly grateful to Jo Green from the Safety Centre for hosting the session. If you have never been before, do visit and support them! What they are doing to ensure children have a meaningful immersive learning experience around safety is truly wonderful.

Thanks also to Matt Cove, Andy Coaten and Gill Bull Mott for demonstrating the CRM systems that their organisations use. It was fascinating seeing how groups are making the most of systems available and reassuring to find that we are often in the same boat when it comes to the barriers we face and the creative ways in which we are overcoming them.

The main needs that emerged from the session were that we all need our CRMs to:

• be a one-stop shop and not need multiple systems
• accessible to multiple users in different locations
• hold upwards of 2,000 records
• be easy for people to subscribe to
• good levels of segmentation and segment management
• be low cost or free
• link people to activities they might be interested in
• record donations and appeal communication
• be GDPR compliant
• send attractive emails and newsletters
• be easy to keep up to date
• generate useful analysis
• be user friendly and customisable

We’d love to hear from other groups as to whether this chimes with your needs? Is there anything else you need from a CRM? Would you recommend anything that you’ve found satisfies some or all of these needs?

Who knows, if we have a strong ‘ask’ we might be able to find the right system or even encourage development of one!

Do email us and let us know what you think.