Tool: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems for Civic Participation

Customer Relationship Management tools can help civil society organizations and governments keep in touch with their collaborators.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are used widely by the private sector to keep track of customer interactions and for marketing purposes. CRMs are also useful for governments and civil society organizations to help build networks, target offerings and engagement opportunities to citizen and resident segments and support community organizing efforts. Often times, a non-profit sector CRM "system" ends up being a spreadsheet on someone's computer, but that can make it difficult to collaborate and lacks the time-saving features of a modern CRM.

These systems can be expensive and difficult to customize to organizational needs, but there are some open source solutions that can be deployed more cheaply, like the ones listed in the link below (thanks to one of Austin's civil society organization leaders, Mateo Clarke of Open Austin, for the link).

Link: Top 6 Open Source CRM Tools

What do you use as a CRM system? Does it work for you?