Managing contacts

Any consultation involving a large number of participants needs some way of managing all the contacts with them. First they need to know about the consultation, then brought in, kept informed and engaged during the process, and given feedback at the end.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software should help. It is designed to keep track of many contracts in many organizations - both how to contact them and notes on each contact.

Unfortunately, much commercial CRM software has been designed to meet the needs of private sector sales campaigns, classifying customers as prospects, and conflating every contact in a company as the same relationship. Neither applies in public consultation, as NSEC discovered when they wanted to use CRM software to keep track of their separate contacts with administrators, teachers and students in schools. They ended up customising the open source Sugar CRM software to their needs.