A recent survey showed that 80% of the websites surveyed ignored customer questions. Most web sites have a "Contact Us" page that contains either an e-mail address or a form for visitors to ask questions. Our survey showed that 80% of the sites never answered these questions. The organizations that did respond to questions reported that they received about 5 such questions every day. So this means that the rest of you are ignoring about 5 potential donors per day. That's about 1850 per year!

Have you tested your website's "Contact Us" page lately?

Now, thinking this through... these donors are probably more than the casual donors. They are probably more informed (they probably read through your site), they are probably more interested (they made an effort to contact you), and they are probably more susceptible to relationship building (they initiated the relationship).

This is the perfect example of failing CRM. You have the technology and it's working but the people and procedures behind it are failing. Remember CRM is 50% people, 30% process, and only 20% technology.

Remember to document your procedures, test your procedures, and train your staff regularly.

Andar previously used a third-party utility to generate the long form of the profile report. Serious bugs in this utility prevented some profiles from printing. The only correction available was to purchase the latest version of the utility. Since the new license was going to cost thousands for each customer, Helix decided instead to switch to a different strategy. We chose a web-based architecture that allows the creation and then printing of custom web pages generated from dashboards and bio tabs. The long form of the profile report now generates a hidden bio tab "resembling" the previous version of the long form report and then prints it. This report will continue to evolve.

The MIG module takes advantage of the new architecture to allow you to customize the look of the profile report plus print dashboards and bio tabs. Examples of the reports can be found on the MIG module description page (login required).

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe