Carleton has a diverse and rich portfolio of enterprise applications, ranging from large multi-purpose applications that store the college’s data to robust document imaging applications that store and organize documents. This fall, we introduce a new member to our family of enterprise applications, Salesforce CRM.
Constituent Resource Management (CRM) applications specialize in engagement. Not only do they collect bits and bytes of data, but they specialize in executing and collecting interactions with people, places, and things. CRM was born in the sales industry as a type of technology to track interactions with clients. These interactions were shared across the company’s sales, marketing, and customer service divisions so that everyone had a 360 degree view of each client.
CRM has now moved far beyond the sales industry, to government, retail, health, non-profit, and higher education. You don’t need to sell a sprocket to realize the value of good customer service. We do customer service every day with our students, employees, and alumni. CRMs thrive at making you better at tracking interactions with your ‘customers’.
We have just launched our first CRM projects on campus during the month of February. These projects focus on departments that work with alumni who volunteer for Carleton. Our Alumni Annual Fund office interacts with over 600 Carleton alums that then interact with their classmates to help Carleton realize its goals and dreams. We will be creating a CRM community to help those 600+ alums have better engagement with their classmates. Additionally, our Alumni Annual Fund staff as well as the Career Center staff will be using CRM to track and improve their engagement with Carleton alumni. The College will now have the ability to share information about how our alumni (and parents) engage with the institution in many different ways and through many different departments. The benefits include: easier and more timely sharing of information, better stewarded volunteers, and deepening of relationships with our key supporters.
For more information, contact Julie Creamer.