This post is second in a three-part series of my key takeaways from my three favorite sessions that I attended at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (#11NTC). Yesterday I told you about tracking and analyzing your work in social media. Today I’m sharing information about integrating social media information in your Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) database. Tomorrow I’ll share what I learned in the session “SEO 201:  Advanced SEO: Secret Offsite Strategies That’ll Blow Your SEO Mind.“

Social Media and Contact Relationship Management – The New Mix (#11NTCSocialCRM)

And they weren’t kidding – this IS the NEW mix! Integrating social media data into your CRM is bleeding edge, folks, and there just aren’t many great solutions for this… yet. But expect that to change very soon!

Social media is excellent at reaching new audiences, but still lags behind in being effective at fundraising. But if you start capturing the data in your CRM database, you can start to track and grow your relationships that get started in social media.

What you can do:

First think through your goals and determine your CRM needs. What knowledge can you get from your organization’s key social media channels, and what knowledge will be most useful. What return do you want to see and is the work worth it?

There’s a good chance you’ll need to invest in technical resources, like paid listening tools and tracking systems (Spredfast, Radian6, HootSuite Pro, etc.)

Much of the actual tracking is still done manually by cutting and pasting the content you want to track into your CRM. If you can, use interns to help with this.

Example: Fight Colorectal Cancer

Colorectal Cancer is using Salesforce as their CRM and has started integrating some information from twitter into Salesforce using the Salesforce for Twitter app. They currently do a search and pull down info from all mentions and retweets related to their organizational twitter account. Each mention or retweet creates a new contact, which they work to manually merge with existing accounts if the contact is already in their CRM.

They use the info to track case management and use the reports to help inform donors and secure funding. They have also created a dashboard, allowing staff to easily see the top engagers of their organization on twitter.

Check back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about advanced, off-site SEO strategies.