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(a)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
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