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Consulting is a short-term agreement between a customer and a consultant to get something done. A friend of mine described it as providing a Capable Brain for Rent. If that’s true, what do I expect our customers to want to rent my brain for?

To generalize broadly, the environmental nonprofits we work with are all trying to motivate action in service of a better environment in our region. They do this in a variety of ways—through legal protection, research, organizing citizens, or one of countless other approaches. They achieve their aims by targeting different populations—government and policy makers, ordinary citizens, corporations, etc. It ends up being a pretty fragmented movement, and it can be tough to see what all these groups have in common. It can be even harder to try to figure out what common needs could be served with a database application, and how to build consulting expertise to help them out.

But there are some things that most groups do:

• Bringing money in the door through fundraising and grants, and managing those financial transactions
• Planning and holding events for current donors/members/volunteers
• Communicating timely information to donors/members/volunteers. This can include email action alerts and newsletters.
• Performing outreach activities to find new donors/members/volunteers. Example activities include petitioning, and political campaign activities like canvassing and phone banking.

While the needs listed above seem wildly diverse, there is a thread holding them together—they all are come down to knowing constituents, and providing the constituent with relevant options for action. Action is what brings about the vision of the organization, and effective action on a large scale can have incredible impact.

Technology can support the motivating of action in a couple ways. First, having a really great way to house the names and data about your constituents gives the organization confidence it knows who it knows. Second, being able to record all the different communications it has with constituents and tracking their actions allows the organization to gauge its effectiveness.

This kind of technology is not easy to implement. In fact, nonprofits have been struggling with it for decades. I think we can help nonprofits implement a database that will help them activate their constituents—that can be incredibly powerful for a nonprofit with great ideas and the energy to follow through on them. And over time, the organization can develop mutually beneficial relationships with constituents that bring about large-scale change, and we can be a helping hand along the way.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 5:24 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.