Subject: Managing Campaign Contacts
Z2K are hoping to create some kind of data base of contact information.
Ideally we would need to be able to sort the contacts by Name, Organisation, Type (journalist, expert, MP, Peer), Area of interest (we campaign in a number of areas and some contacts will have more than one area of interest)
It should also ideally carry information of all past contact we've had with the individual or office.
I'm sure an Excel spread sheet could do all this but I worry it would be very fiddly and time consuming. Further, there is no guarantee I actually have the know how to create one. Is there a (free) programme, or pre-made workbook, we could use as a solution? I am sure we are not the first to have this problem.
Any feedback, experience, tips would be gratefully received.
You're talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) when you talk about recording all your contacts with your contacts, and the two leading cheap/free systems for not-for-profits are CiviCRM and salesforce.com. Thing is, while both are brilliant, neither is effort-free and neither will add the discipline you'll need in your organisation to always record your conversations, add all new contacts, clean up data regularly, etc.
If you've got or can develop that discipline in your organisation, go ahead with one of the above. If you don't, stick with something very simple indeed. Maybe contact-sharing in Google Apps will be enough. For fairly small collaborative projects, Basecamp is easy to use and may be an answer.
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