Agree that we must share information in some central point so that we're all building on each other's work, not approaching the same contacts with the same offers. This doesn't just apply to GLAM but to all areas where we're working with external partners. In Bristol, we've been using Google spreadsheet: not really scalable but could be if more design effort went into it. For this purpose, I much prefer Gdocs to using a wiki, though realise that some people have difficulties or objections with needing a Google account. I'm optimistic that a lot of client relationship management can be organised without crm software, just well-designed spreadsheets.

On Sunday, September 18, 2011, Fae faenwp@gmail.com wrote:

/* This is something of a back-burner topic but an important area for our growing GLAM network and WMUK office */

Hi,

I have been intermittently reporting our "pipeline" of GLAM events to the WMUK board by using a Google Document. This just lists our main partners (British Museum, Derby Museum etc.) and says what has been happening recently and what we are discussing as a forthcoming event. Now we have a WMUK office, a CEO about to join and we will have a coordinator in Scotland in a couple of months, it might be useful to take this up a notch to ensure coordination is a bit more reliable and we don't loose too many new opportunities by accident.

There are some options based on our experience so far and I would welcome suggestions for how to do this better.

• Google Docs * This is my favourite option, it's free, good for

collaboration and tracking and we could run, say, a spreadsheet summary with one tab per cultural partner to log the progress of actions, phone calls and meetings. Though documents can be fully public, they don't all have to be so there are fewer issues with including contact details for our partners. It might be worth running a central "office" account that then manages who the key documents are shared with. With some support from WMUK office staff, GDocs could be run as a reasonable customer relationship management solution.

• Wiki * We have some experience of trying this with the outreach wiki

but it is hard to maintain (boring having to cut & paste templates and fiddle about) and security becomes more of an issue if we would like to keep contact details on it.

• Off the shelf * Anything decent would not be free, but it might be

worth paying for a few tens of licenses for a (cloud based) customer relationship management tool that can have a official shared contact book, a calendar (maybe sync with GCal) and track events, report action status, risks, log key emails and phonecalls with partners and WMUK suppliers.

I think that we have automatically resisted "forcing" a tracking tool on our GLAM e-volunteers but I keep hearing of things going on that I (and sometimes the board) were either not aware of or might have forgotten about the "chat in a pub" that a volunteer interpreted as the nod to do something. The GLAM programme is now too large for one person to know about everything so a centralized system is becoming quite urgently needed.

Thoughts?

Cheers, Fae -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags