To Get Better at What You Do…

You’ll be successful if you faithfully do the best you can with what you have

Invest your time wisely.

When it comes to the way we eat, we don’t sit down on the first day of the month and eat the entire month’s food in one sitting.  No, we have a little bite often – usually 3 meals a day with an extra coffee or two and perhaps a snack thrown in. And we actually have structured meal time. If you like, you have an appointment with a plate of food each morning, noon and evening.

When it comes to our personal learning and growing for our ministry role, the way we eat food is an important analogy.

I don’t believe we can attend one management conference and expect that it will make us effective leaders. That’d be like eating just one meal for the month.

I encourage you to be deliberate and plan your week so you are getting regular snacks (and meals) of good “food”. The way to do it is to add it into your calendar like you would any other important meeting, Set aside time to:

  • Read email from industry leaders – First you need to sign up to receive their weekly/daily emails
  • Attend at least one webinar every month
  • Listen to, or watch one podcast each week

There are a lot of opinions out there so make sure you pick people who actually have valid credentials. Here are a couple of site I highly recommend:

Record Your Donor Details

Here is a simple Excel spreadsheet as a starting place for recording your donor details.

Download

Read a little more on CRM systems.

CRM Software

There are literally hundreds of options for a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for your ministry. There are some free options but usually they are limited to a short time or a small number of records.

One truly Free option worth exploring is TNTConnect

As CRM software is a rapidly changing field you are probably best to do your own search. But before you do here are some questions you should consider. Start by thinking about Strategy.

  • Are you doing agressive donor acquisition or more focussed on retention activity?
  • What Details do you want to store? For Who? Donors, Customers, Volunteers?
  • Where do you want to house your data? Locally? Cloud?
  • How many donors do you need to manage?
  • What questions do you need reports on?
  • How many people will need access to your donor details on a daily basis?
  • What other systems do you need to work with? eg email lists, websites, events, social media?
  • How will you manage Privacy and Security?

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