Contact Management
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Description of Contact Management
A system for tracking and maintaining infor mation about the organisation's relationship with a contact. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is related to this.
For personal missionary use see: "Packages for Missionaries" under Donor Management
How is Contact Management used in Missions?
A huge amount of Missions has to do with relationships, and they need to track information about those relationships.
Some of those relationships are (and they may have different requirements):
- Donors
- Prayer Supporters
- People interested in the mission (getting publications)
- Churches
- People interested in becoming missionaries
- Candidates who are applying to become a missionary or are in training
- Current Missionaries
- Former Missionaries
- Other missions (partners etc).
Issues with Contact Management
The major problems for Missions is finding suitable Contact Management systems that will support the way they work. For example, churches are complicated organisations, with church members whose address is not the same as the church, and the software may not be able to model this complicated relationship.
Finding solutions which avoid data duplication is not easy.
Different implementations and solutions for Contact Management
Donor Management systems usually contain some sort of contact management, but many do not do it well. They also only cover a few of the relationships.
Some missions use ACT.
A decent, small contact manager is "Now Contact" from Now Software
Another one is ebase