Playing Well With Others – It’s not just for kindergarten.
by Alan Lewis on Friday, March 12th, 2010
For most of us, kindergarten was a very long time ago. But, if we were lucky, most of us learned some simple but very valuable lessons there. One of those lessons, certainly, is that playing well with others is good for us and the community. Fast forward a “few” years and you’re managing a nonprofit organization; devoted to improving your immediate community and the world beyond. Thank you for that, by the way. You work assiduously at raising funds for your organization’s cause and its good works. There are lots of tools in your tool chest to help you do that: your donor database (or “CRM”), your e-mail blast campaign software, your event management or ticketing software (if you host events), your payment processors for taking donations on-line, and your accounting application for keeping the financial books. Chances are, these software tools didn’t attend the same kindergarten that you did. Well, we’ve just taken them back to school.
If the software applications that you use to perform the essential functions of your organization don’t “play well” together, don’t share data between them seamlessly, and chances are, right now, they don’t, then you and the others in your organization are wasting huge amounts of time exporting data out of one database, only to be able to import it into another, all simply to perform tasks that are essential to your organization’s fundraising efforts. Frustrated? Yeah, we know, and we were too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We created a simple, yet powerful, web application with CRM deep in its DNA and heart. Then, we made sure it plays well with others. We listened carefully to dozens of folks in dozens of organizations just like your’s and they told us which third party applications they tended to use regularly in their operations. Then we brought all of these apps, and our’s, to Citizen’s “kindergarten” and made sure they learned the new rules: the software works for you, not the other way around.