Why Community Projects Need CRM Too
by Joe Brockmeier - Mar. 18, 2010Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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You might think of customer relationship management (CRM) software as something that's only useful for businesses, but it can play an important role in the health of a community project as well.
Think of it not as "customer" relationship management, but community management software. In every community I've worked with, there's been a revolving cast of participants who each have contact with a slice of the internal community and external contacts for that community. Think about everything from managing conferences and sponsorships, to working with other open projects.
Now, when I say "projects," I'm talking about larger projects like GNOME, KDE, PostgreSQL, and the big distros. Smaller projects may not have much need to build an institutional memory, but the bigger projects could (and should) take a cue from well-run businesses and implement a CRM and encourage core contributors to use it.
CRMs are good for keeping contacts and conversations straight, and providing a written history of interactions that help current contributors keep on track and future contributors can use for reference. Discussions on public lists provide some "paper" trail to refer to, but lots of discussion and planning goes on between individuals.
A few examples of where CRM would do a world of good:
1) Project contributors work with sponsors to put on an event. They do all the legwork of finding the proper contacts for sponsoring, and even the timelines for requesting sponsorship and the ins/outs of working with different organizations. Best case scenario (sans CRM), when those contributors move on to different roles, they do a brain dump and pass on a lossy bunch of notes pulled out of email and notes that takes far too long to process.
2) Tracking volunteers who can help with events. As openSUSE Community Manager I worked with several ambassadors who organized events. Most of that information is kept in my mail spool, but it would have been more useful and helpful to have it in a CRM that would allow access by other openSUSE contributors.
3) Wrangling press contacts. It'd be very useful for projects to have a persistent list of press contacts to reach out to around releases.
The list goes on and on. The reasons against CRM are complexity and privacy. That is to say, using a CRM introduces complexity on several levels, and projects need to think seriously about any privacy implications of using a CRM to track contact information.
Complexity can't be fully solved, but it can be mitigated by providing some training on the chosen CRM (and it shouldn't be hard to find a good open source CRM), and encouraging contributors to use it consistently.
Privacy can be addressed by implementing a reasonable privacy policy. Most projects already have privacy policies, so in those cases it should be a matter of adhering to the policy at hand.
 Some projects, like GNOME, are already starting to use CRM to help make life easier for contributors and ensure that less time is spent re-gathering information that contributors have already put in place. If your project hasn't yet, it might be time to start.
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