Tech Forum

I keep finding myself needing a CRM for my church activity. I want to keep notes, tasks, and calendar events, on my home teaching families. I want to keep notes on my interactions with members. This would be so very useful to the Church community. We need CRM functionality.

So what is CRM?

jdlessley wrote:So what is CRM?

Business speak. Customer relationship management. Software to hold all the information about a customer, contacts, notes etc.

For legal/privacy reasons, I don't think it will ever happen. At least nothing organized by the church.

russellhltn wrote:For legal/privacy reasons, I don't think it will ever happen. At least nothing organized by the church.

Except for the missionary area book!

There are plenty of personal information management tools available that you could use for your personal purposes. Some tools are online cloud-based and others are apps you can install on your computer/phone/tablet. Some synchronize between devices.

Two tools you might want to consider are Microsoft One Note and Evernote. Both have a free version available. There are plenty of other tools you might want to consider, too; these just came to mind since they're free, available on multiple platforms, and don't have to be connected to the internet to use.

Yes, there are plenty of free tools available. I'm using free tools, which is dangerous, because member data is being kept outside of church IT control. I can't share this data. I can't aggregate it. I can't initiate workflows which cause the data to bounce amongst other ward leadership.

We need our lds tools to begin including CRM features. Ward leadership needs to be able to keep notes on members for items such as welfare needs. We need to be able to setup forms for data entry with workflow triggers behind the forms. Records clerks needs to have a form for data entry when they are working on the 14-some-odd-steps it now takes to move out a member. When records transfer from one ward to another, Bishops needs to be able to transfer notes that follow the members.

We need CRM features.

I see that the Church is using MS Dynamics. The platform already exists. Please extend this to the ecclesiastic leadership.

christopherlohman wrote:I see that the Church is using MS Dynamics. The platform already exists. Please extend this to the ecclesiastic leadership.

The forum is primarily user to user support. There is little chance those in decision making positions will read this thread. The best chance to get your suggestions to those decision makers is to use the LDS.org feedback link. While feedback sent through that link is not interactive and a majority of responses are automated, rest assured it will get routed to the right people.

bryan.hartsock wrote:Who would be the one / group that makes the decisions on technology implementation for the church or even running a technology pilot program in a certain area?

The decision on what and how things are done is made by the First Presidency and Presiding Bisohpric. They work out the priorities and send it down to the small team of developers.

Note that any kind of CRM can quicly run into privacy issues. As soon as you record those into a computer, the complications multiply.