Ann Clarke of Gr8IdeasAtWork is a Professional Speaker and veteran ACT! Software User

Ann Clarke cracked the code on maximizing IGAs (Income Generating Activities) when she discovered ACT! Sage Software.

As a long-time professional speaker plus acting chief cook and bottle washer on the business side of www.Gr8IdeasAtWork.com, Ann knew the importance of simplifying her business processes so she could book more speaking gigs and do what she loves most: speaking to and helping women balance successful lives.

So years ago she invested time and resources into learning every feature in her ACT! contact manager to help her run her business more efficiently. Today she uses the new ACT! Sage 2010 to…

1. Manage her email communication with clients and prospects by attaching incoming and outgoing messages to client records–which eliminates wasted time searching in her inbox
2. Create and track each speaking contract iteration so she always knows which version she sent out last
3. Track all notes and activities with each client for finger-tip access during subsequent conversations
4. Earn thousands of dollars of extra income by mining her database for booking agents near her keynote speaking gigs and offering them one-hour breakfast presentations while she’s “in the neighborhood.”

Because ACT! has been around for more than 20 years, it has a dedicated app developer base that creates special programs to augment ACT!’s contact management features. Ann’s 2 favorite ACT! add-ons are:

• CardScan Executive – which she uses to quickly enter all her business cards the same day she collects them and
• AddressGrabber – which copies electronic contact information from email addresses, websites, and directories, then imports it into her ACT! database for follow up.

Both utilities eliminate time-consuming data entry.

Ann says there’s a big difference between professional speakers who use Outlook to manage their contacts and those who’ve discovered ACT! Software. “I’ve eliminated all my file folders!” she says.

More About Ann Clarke…

Ann Clarke’s lifelong vision has been to help women become successful in business. “When women are financially successful, they have better choices.”

Thirty years ago selling houses was one way women could make a lot of money. So in 1978, as a professional writer and photographer, Ann began creating marketing programs for women in real estate. Through “personal promotion marketing” she taught her clients to create bonds with people they had never met. Her reputation grew with her clients’ successes, and she became nationally known as THE expert in “personal promotion marketing.”

It wasn’t long until she was invited to speak at seminars, workshops and conferences across the U.S. and Canada. Her how-to articles appeared frequently in national and regional business publications in print and on the web. Eventually she sold her marketing company to become a full-time speaker. Ann says, “It’s more fun to preach to a crowd than nag one person at a time!”

Ann also draws from her stories in Chicken Soup for the Father & Daughter Soul and Chicken Soup for the Caregiver’s Soul to include tips to help women balance the successful lives she has helped them to create. Quick to recognize that women in business love to learn, Ann created conferences, symposiums and retreats to put other women in the spotlight and showcase their knowledge. She is also the Founder and CEO of Colorado Women of Influence, LLC, a CEO-level mastermind group for highly successful women in business.

Are you a professional speaker who uses ACT! Software? Please share some of your tips with us in the comments below.

Drip marketing is not something I just talk about, it’s the primary marketing strategy I’ve integrated into my business for the past 6 years.

(I’ve actually relied on drip marketing for more than 20 years, but it’s only been recently that drip marketing automation software has scaled to desktop use for SMBs, small sales teams and consultants. Cost is no longer a barrier to entry; for under a few hundred dollars a month, any size company can compete digitally for more business with drip marketing automation.)

I’d like to share one of my personal drip marketing success stories with you. It’s a great example of why it’s so important to implement a drip marketing strategy sooner rather than later. 

About a year ago, my company received a referral for a new ACT! database prospect. Initially our marketing manager, Golda Cohen, talked with him, and then sent him a proposal for our services.

Proposal Follow-Up Drip Marketing Campaign

Immediately he was added to our proposal follow-up drip marketing campaign to educate him about all of our other services that he had not yet asked about. 

Of course, Golda continued to follow up on this sales opportunity personally. And now that he was a high-priority prospect, he also received e-mails from us inviting him to our live events.

I don’t remember if this sale took longer or shorter to close than normal, but we did finally get the order. Golda then scheduled an installation date for our Senior Consultant and a different day for database marketing training with me.

Our client’s ACT! database was installed without a hitch (we love when this happens), and now it was time for training. Several months had passed since our client first entered our sales pipeline, and throughout his journey with us, all the way up to his day of training, I never once had a conversation with him.

On the day of training, I showed up at our new customer’s office and waited for him while he finished a phone call. Then he appeared and exclaimed to me…

(The Big Reveal)

“Lori–are you ‘“THE Database Diva? I’ve been reading your stuff, and
I was really looking forward to meeting you!”

Frankly, he caught me completely off guard! I was looking forward to meeting him, too, of course. But he was really looking forward to meeting me! In fact, he already felt like we knew each other, even though we’d never said as much as a “hello” to each other.

That’s because for months, he had been absorbing everything we sent him about our sales process, our implementation team, our quick-start tips and our case studies. He was now an informed customer who was eager to taste his own success. So we got down to business and had a great training day.

The proposal follow-up drip marketing campaign is one of 7 Must-Have Drip Marketing Campaigns I believe every sales organization needs to differentiate itself from the competition. More important, these drip campaigns reduce the risk factor all prospects inherently feel while going through their buying process. The customer knows he must make a decision to buy or not to buy. But that doesn’t mean he enjoys the decision making process. If anything, he’s looking for reasons to eliminate you from his short list to make his selection that much easier.

As I reflected on it later that evening, I realized…

Wouldn’t it be great if every new business relationship started out just like this one–with a customer who was this thrilled and delighted to be doing business with us?

Drip Marketing, The Secret Sauce

Having a well thought through proposal follow-up campaign, in this case, was a critical factor in closing this sale and giving our customer an overwhelming number of reasons to validate his wise decision to select us as his vendor.

Yes, it took me several hours to think through the sequence of messages I wanted to include in my drip marketing campaign. And, yes, then I had to write all the messages.

And I wasn’t satisfied that this was a perfect drip campaign. I wanted to include more information than I had room for. (I only wanted the campaign to last about as long as my typical sales cycle.) But “done is better than perfect.” And my one-time investment of thought and copywriting continues to reap goodwill and smarter clients and prospects as I add them to this same drip campaign.

Drip Marketing’s 85/15 Ratio

A successful drip marketing campaign is 85% strategy and only 15% technology. That’s why they’re so hard to execute. Most companies starting out with drip marketing get this equation all wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is thinking their marketing automation software gives them an unrestricted license to blast the same promotion 24/7. Boring! And ineffective.

Marketers know intuitively this approach won’t work. Yet they don’t know what to do instead. (That’s why I created my 30-day DripMarketingCamp.) They end up missing out on a special opportunity to help prospects fall in love with them via long-term education (and entertinment). We all know that an educated customer makes better buying decisions. It’s also a lot more fun to work with more engaged customers who want to work towards a common goal of building a solid business releationship.

This is Part 2 of my article outlining a get-started drip-marketing checklist. You can read Part 1 here. 

Like any complex, overwhelming task, launching your first drip marketing campaign is easier if you break down big concepts into discreet, do-able action items. Here’s the second half of the checklist.

5. Set up your campaign in your drip marketing automation content editor. If you don’t yet have one, I recommend Swiftpage because it’s easy to learn and one of the least expensive (I am a reseller of this program). Create a template for each message you wrote in step 4. Then set up the timing between each stage.  Build in several call-list stages to follow-up with contacts who are most responsive at each stage of  your campaign.

 6. Add the contacts you coded in step 2 and launch the campaign. By the time you complete steps 1-5, this step will seem very anti-climatic because you already went through the entire thought process. However, if you’re a uber-perfectionist, you may want to launch your campaign to yourself first to see how and when it arrives.

7. Analyze the results. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” drip campaign. You can dot all the i’s, cross all the T’s, and strategize till the cows come home, but you still won’t be intuitive enough to know what your contacts will think or how they’ll behave after receiving your messages. If you engineer a feedback loop into your messages, you’ll get questions or suggestions that may make you rethink your drip strategy. The campaign reports are also valuable for showing you disconnects in your thought process.  Don’t be afraid to incorporate direct and indirect feedback. Tweak everything – messages, stages, sequencing.

Once you’ve launched your first live drip marketing campaign, you’ll see how much easier it is to build and integrate the next one (and the next one, and the next one) until all your business’ black holes are plugged up.

Most businesses don’t communicate with their customer base enough, so they miss sales because of their inability to “clone” their salespeople. So it’s not hard to see the benefits of adding drip marketing to your marketing plan, which automates the follow-up process and identifies the *hot* prospects from the ones who are only “half-baked.”

The roadblock to implementing is the execution. Drip marketing is inherently overwhelming, with its multiple steps, if/then processes and prolific copywriting requirements. It can morph into a never-ending project.

Can, but doesn’t have to.

I’ve compiled a 7-point checklist to help you overcome your roadblock. The checklist works if you don’t skip ahead or jump around the list. To complete your first successful drip marketing campaign, you don’t move to the next step until you’ve completed the first–even if a single step takes a month to complete. This checklist is the process I teach in my DripMarketingCamp, and I’m sharing the process with you to remove some of its mystery.

This post contains checklist steps 1-4. In my next post I cover checklist steps 5-7.

Drip Marketing Step-by-Step

1. Pick one “trigger event” in your business where  you have the worst follow up. (It’s probably on my list of the “7 must-have drip marketing campaigns.”) Plug up that black hole first. It may be hard to focus on only one campaign. It may feel like that one “blends” into another one you struggle with. If you can’t decide which one to start with because they’re each problem areas for you, no worries. Just pick one. Eventually you’ll complete them all.
2. Define your target audience for this campaign. This will be a lot easier now that you’ve focused on your starter campaign. Code the contacts in your database that qualify to receive this drip campaign, so you have an easy way to group them. (This is called list segmentation, which is the first step in having more meaningful conversations with your contacts.)
3. Determine which messages you want to send, and the sequence you want to send them in. The easiest way to do this is to select a contact you actually know from the target list. Where is this person in your sales process? What does he or she need to know at this stage of your relationship in order to take the next step with you? What “call to action” is appropriate: Asking them to join a webinar? Read a white paper? Offering a special promotion? Join a demo?  What’s the next logical step you want them to take with you? Plot it out. Now that you know who you’re engaging and what you want to say to them, you’ll know how to space out the messages. Is one a day too frequent? One message a week? Following up on a proposal has a different pace than following up on a website lead. Knowing who you’re focused on in a drip marketing campaign makes sequencing a common-sense decision.
4. Write each message, including a subject line for each email message in the drip. Hot tip: Revisit the history of your last 5 big sales. Research what you did to move them through the sales process, in the order you did it. Check your email “sent” folder for message ideas. That’s a rich ”library” of information you tend to repeat with each of your contacts, and these messages typically have a logical progression to them. Won’t it be nice to have a relevant templated response for all future prospects in your pipeline?

I’ll share the second part of this drip marketing campaign checklist in my next post. In the meantime, feel free to ask me a question about drip marketing or share your ideas for your own drip marketing campaigns.

In the late 80s, I was Regional Sales Manager for a national database company that sold business intelligence and mailing lists primarily through onsite seminars and inbound marketing (pre-Internet marketing!)

The company invested more than $50,000 in a contact management system that was programmed to spit out follow-up drip marketing letters every 7 days once a prospect identified himself. 

As an email marketing consultant, I read more than a normal amount of simply terrible email marketing campaigns. I don’t mean junk email, because nobody reads those. I mean breathtakingly feeble attempts at online promotions that sincere business owners or wannabe marketers deliberately compose in hopes of selling somebody something. (Somebody? Anybody?)

Usually my suppressed lizard brain activates my delete key finger within seconds of a subject-line scan. But today I came across this message which may win the Nobel Prize for Most Violations of Common Sense in a Single Email Marketing Campaign.

So in homage to a spine-tingling, gruesome Halloween in Marketingville, I offer up this 8-point postmortem examination and dissection in  hopes that you will strike these transgressions from your email marketing repertoire at once. I promise, this patient was already dead before he reached my Inbox.

1. A Yahoo email address on a business email? Really? Dude, on first glimpse, all I read was “glob.” [Delete]
2. Who the H is Josh Walker? And how does he know what I’d be interested in? [Delete]
3. First, if Josh wants me to see his webpage, I’m much more inclined to click on a text link rather than this gnarly HTML (too intimidating). But if he must flash the entire URL at me, can he not think of something better to call it than “advertising-information?” [Delete]
4. There’s Josh again. And now he wants me to hurry? Josh, why do I care about your brand new program? [Delete]
5. One word: Proof Read! (Oh wait; that’s 2). AND QUIT YELLING AT ME WITH YOUR ALL CAPS. (We learned this in 1998.) BTW, you’ve exceeded your exclamation point quota…and, um, please tell Josh I’m still waiting for the “why do I care” part. [Delete]
6. Another URL? Which one do I click? You haven’t explained either one. Josh, you’re confusing me. And confused readers [Delete].
7. Well, look! It’s Josh himself signing off on this email. Note to Josh: Pick a narrative to write in– First person or third–unless you have multiple personalities. In which case, get 2 email accounts. [Delete]
8. Uh huh. I made it to the bottom of your email, Josh, and I trust you less now than I did when I first opened your message. So I kept scrolling down to see if I could find your CAN-SPAM footer and opt out. Not surprisingly, the only way I can opt out of receiving anything from you is to reply to your glob Yahoo address. I’d rather right-click and tell Microsoft to “add sender to blocked senders list.” Or just [Delete].

Now, stop haunting everyone’s email inbox until you can show us why we should care about anything you have to say.

Two years ago I had a custom closet built in my bedroom. The closet company did a great job and finished promptly. So I asked them to give me estimates on two more projects. My thought was to do one custom closet per year.

Well, as you know, life happens. But this year, when I was finally ready…I couldn’t remember the company’s name. I couldn’t find the receipt from the job they did for me. And in all this time, they never called! They never wrote! I haven’t heard so much as a peep from them.

I don’t get this. Is the closet organization business the only one that is booming during this business downturn that’s affecting everyone else? Is there such a backlog of overflowing closets belonging to women-entrepreneur workaholics that this company doesn’t feel the need to do any marketing?

The truism that it costs significantly more to get a new customer than to sell additional products and services to existing customers is TRUE.

The closet company already had given me estimates for my new projects. I was pre-sold. Yes, I was a “not now” customer at the time, but I was their not-now customer! All they would’ve had to do was send me a postcard or call me up and say, “Are you ready now?” and I would’ve been theirs. No big ad campaign; no salesman site visit for measurement. I was as close to low-hanging fruit as it comes.

If you own a business or you’re in sales, it should be in your DNA to do whatever you can to continue long-term relationships with customers. The profit is in the second and subsequent sale! Why?

There’s no advertising cost!

Why wasn’t I at least invited to receive an email newsletter from this company? I wouldn’t mind seeing pictures of other perfect closets (especially since I have two other ones waiting for makeovers). I’d have opted-in to get special sales info or any coupons they have. In fact, a coupon might have motivated me to pull the trigger on my next order sooner.

As a CRM consultant, this lack of follow-through drives me crazy. That’s because there IS one more thing you can do to attract new business to your company during a downturn, instead of waiting until the economic tides turn on their own.

All this closet company needed to stay in touch were two inexpensive tools: 1) a customer database (like ACT! Software) — for under $350 and 2) an email service provider.

The email marketing service I recommend is Swiftpage. There are hundreds of excellent email service providers but this is the only one that integrates with ACT Software. That means there’s no need to export and upload lists, an extra step that prevents a lot of businesses from sending consistent marketing campaigns.

Swiftpage also rates as my top email service because starting this fall it will automatically be part of the new version of ACT Software, known as ACT! e-Marketing.  The cost to send  3,000 emails is about $55/month.

Swiftpage comes with ready-made templates or you can create your own. Deliverability is higher with Swiftpage than sending through Outlook because Swiftpage works with the major ISPs who recognize them as a professional service and not some untraceable spammer out of Nigeria.

Swiftpage also monitors opt-outs (the service is entirely CAN-SPAM compliant, which is a law, not an option). Best of all, it shows who opens your email, who clicks on your links (so you see who’s interested in what) and it generates call lists of hot prospects to hand off to salespeople for follow up. Salespeople can see the contact’s readership score “diary” by looking in the ACT marketing database history.

Swiftpage’s Team and Pro versions also allow you to ”schedule send” or “send as,” so you save time by programming a month of messages in advance to be sent out under the sales rep’s name (instead of a spammy “from” address like sales@company.com).

Once you’re comfortable sending basic emails, move your business up to the next level of sophisticated (and time-saving) stay-in-touch marketing messages with Swiftpage drip marketing. Drip marketing lets you string together a series of email templates based on business triggers–in the case of my closet company, they could’ve sent me a reminder or a coupon once a quarter and then scheduled a sales rep to call me if I hadn’t called the company by then.

Like everyone, I get a lot of spam. I delete messages on vitamins, sex aids and stock tips. But a nice newsletter from a company I’ve done business with before would be fine. It may even remind my failing memory to place another order that I meant to do anyway.

So don’t let good customers forget about you. The replacement cost of losing a good customer is far more expensive than a $55/month drip-marketing follow-up system.

P.S. At the end of July I’m holding my 4th DripMarketingCamp. In under 30 days, I teach you how to professionally design, write and launch one customized follow-up campaign for your company’s “not now” customers and prospects. Check it out; just one drip marketing campaign could plug up a major black hole in your sales follow-up process.

There’s gold in them thar rejected email addresses, and most businesses don’t mine for it.

List clean up is never fun, so it gets deferred to the bottom of the to-do list. But cleaning up your email list after each marketing email gives you additional insight into your customers and the kinds of information you should or should not be emailing to them. These are the 4 kinds of undeliverable email addresses you should clean up:

1. Bounced emails come in two flavors: Soft bounces are technically correct email addresses that temporarily don’t deliver because the recipient’s email server may be busy or their email inbox is filled up. Or the internet gods are just having a bad day–who really knows? But the next time you send email to these addresses, they deliver with no problem.

Hard bounces are dead email addresses (they’re what Swiftpage calls “3 bounces” because they’ve tried and failed to send this address three times without success. Continuing to transmit bad email addresses is a flag that you’re a spammer and is one of the ways you can get your mailings blacklisted). In today’s business environment, a hard bounce probably means the recipient no longer occupies the chair at his former company or the company itself has gone out of business.

Hard bounces must be updated so you don’t lose future opportunities. If your specific contact is no longer there, who took his place? If no one did, who’s now in charge of the decision making for your product and service? Find out and you can add them to a new prospect drip marketing campaign. 

2. Invalid email addresses. Sometimes a missed keystroke can render a good email address worthless. Maybe *someone* left out or added a character or transposed characters. Often you can fix these email addresses just by looking at them. If not, sometimes they can be corrected by looking up the company’s website to see what naming convention is used.

If you have very many invalid addresses, however, that’s a sign that *someone* is not being careful with data entry. Check the record creator field in your ACT! database to see who entered these contacts. If you see a trend, have a data quality conversation.

3. Duplicate email addresses often indicate a global duplicate problem in your contact database (where there’s one, there’s many). But regarding emailing them, most email service providers, like Swiftpage, won’t send the same email address more than once in a single email transmission, although they will document them so you can clean them up.

But if you segment your list, as you should, you could be over-mailing these duplicate addresses, and that could lead to higher opt-outs. Sometimes duplicate emails are caused when multiple people at the same company share an info@ or sales@ address. In my opinion, you should never mail these addresses anyway because they’re used internally by the company to filter solicitations from true inquiries from their customers.

Instead, be more proactive at point of data entry to get your customer’s personal email address. In fact, set up a dynamic group in your contact database, like ACT! 2010, to pull these kinds of addresses for targeted follow up. For your bigger, global duplicate problem, use a duplicate checking tool like Patricia Egen’s Duplicate Remover Expert Wizard or Ingo Lange’s Workflow IT.

4. Opt-outs are a great excuse for mini-market research. Call them to find out why they asked to be removed from your list. Do they not want to receive your emails (why?) or did they fire you as their vendor? Many times when I follow up, I find out my reader mistakenly hit the “leave this list” button because he didn’t know the email was from me or he thought he was opting out of a single promotion instead of opting out forever. Ouch. That means I must make adjustments to how I present my messaging. An opt out is just the canary in the mine; there are possibly hundreds more who may not have understood something I wrote which led a reader to think what I wrote wasn’t relevant to them.

Sometimes when I follow up with a contact who opted out, he tells me he switched to a competing service. While I’m angry with myself for not uncovering this defection sooner–or getting the opportunity to prevent it–it does give me a chance to find out why I lost the business.

More important, I uncover market trends or gaps in my service I may not have been aware of. Might I be at risk to lose other customers for this same reason? How can I course correct moving forward? I may even schedule a follow-up call for 11 months from now. I already know my customer won’t find a pot of gold using my competitor, but I’ll give him a chance to find that out on his own, then be there to win him back. (And I’d be willing to bet money that my competitor won’t follow up in 11 months!)

One of the biggest mistakes I see emailers make is not cleaning up their bad email addresses. Besides the list clean-up benefits and finding new opportunities at companies where previous contacts are gone, keeping a clean list actually improves your tracking metrics. When the number of emails you send is closer to the number of emails that get delivered, you’re golden.

When you write drip marketing messages, should the copy be long and thorough OR short and to the point? Which gets you the most opens and clicks, do you think?

The knee-jerk reaction is to answer, “Short!” After all, we live in a 140-character world now, thanks to Twitter!

But, there’s a laundry list of considerations that contribute to the right answer, such as…

• Are you targeting prospects or customers (are you known or unknown?)
• What’s your message’s purpose: Website visit, opt-in or sign-up, download, take an order?
• Is your message urgent (to your reader), important (to your reader) or educational?
• Is your story new or original or familiar with a twist? (I truly hope you’re not just spewing product features and leaving it to your readers to see the value.)
• Is a typical sale conceptually easy or complex?
• Is your business transactional or a considered purchase?

(Did you ever notice how consultants answer a question with a question? Doesn’t it drive you crazy? )

The worst that can happen if you mess up the long vs. short decision is not that you’ll lose a sale. It’s that you’ll get an opt-out, and then the opportunity to sell via email is gone forever. This is not an “oh well” thing.

Drip marketing is a long-term strategy that leverages your one-to-one selling time. Every email address in your database is precious–it represents a future buyer. Even when someone does opt-out, it’s a cause for a follow-up to find out why. Opt-outs should never be given up without a fight!

Opt outs are one way to gauge whether your messages resonate. I’ve had success with both short (1-2 sentence) and long (like this one) emails. But I know before I sit down at the keyboard which kind I’m going to write. I’m deliberate. And consistently, over many years now, my email opt-out rate has been less than half of 1%. Which means my readers are engaged (or complacent…but not angry or bored!)

If you’re like most people, your biggest challenges to getting a drip marketing program off the ground are:

1. What to write
2. How to write it
3. Finding time to write when you don’t know how to do 1 and 2

Left to the default, what most will do is:

1. Nothing
2. Continued sales harassment via printed word
3. Rambling on with no point or purpose (barf prose, I call it)

Which is a shame because drip marketing is the most powerful marketing and positioning tool ever invented for small businesses–when done properly.

Here’s an example of drip marketing succes:.

Last week I got a new client, seemingly out of the blue, who told me, “OK, I’ve been on your list for 4 years, reading your stuff, and I finally decided, ‘I’m never going to do this on my own–I need to hire you to help me.’”

I had to go look her up in my database to remember who she was. I never would’ve followed up with her in my regular course of phone-call follow ups. She was too remote a prospect. But it cost me nothing in time or money to keep her on my drip marketing program all these years. And–note–she never opted out in all that time!

Sending consistent messages over the years cerainly played a part in the successful outcome of converting this drip-marketing prospect into a customer. My drip campaign to her over the years finally led her to a) realize she had a problem and b) realize she had a problem that only I could help her solve.  But so did the combination of long and short copy keep her interest piqued and looking forward to the next installment.

Which do you thinks works better in marketing: long or short messages? And why? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Database Management: Everyone hates it. But everyone expects their database to act like it’s perfect when they’re ready to use it for reports or email marketing.

Nonprofit donor databases are the worst. Here’s an email I got from a client I’ll call Sam who’s trying to help a special cause he volunteers for:  “‘The X Day School’s donor database is stuck in the mud with fundraising and interactive communication (name changed to protect the guilty). They use a program called ‘Acme Software’ (name changed to protect the innocent database software program). It’s a mess. They can’t afford a full bells and whistles fundraising database. So, I’m thinking, call Lori, and see what she recommends.”

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Sam, but my magic wand is already working overtime.  Almost every nonprofit I’ve ever talked to or worked with has a screwed up database. But it’s usually not the software’s fault. It’s the users’. The unfortunate truth is, many organizations don’t value their data until it starts costing them money.

Typically nonprofit organizations have lots of turnover. And because everyone hates database management, the job gets delegated to the lowest level or newest volunteer. You know, the one who has good intentions, shows up, and the organization has no clue what to do with him, so they say, “I know! Clean up the database!”

But no one shows him how to use the software properly. There’s no money for software training. Which doesn’t matter, because the organization hasn’t ever adopted a proper database workflow anyway. The volunteer wants to do something, so he improvises. Then that volunteer leaves. His replacement comes in, and the whole process (or lack thereof) starts over again. Over time, the organization gets…stuck in the mud. No money to fix the problem, no time to prevent the problem and no clue how to dig out.

Nonprofits are certainly not the only organizations with this kind of database incompetence. It’s just more magnified in a nonprofit because there’s so much more turnover than in typical company. But as we like to say, no matter what kind of organization is coping with database disasters, “The fish stinks from the head down.”

Database incompetence can never change until leadership realizes that the organization’s database–its financial lifeblood–is the single most important asset they own. That means putting a paid, stable Database Administrator (please note capital letters–this is a real job) in charge and equipping this person with training and vision to do the job properly. Believe it or not, when you actually write a job description and interview someone for this position (even if it’s an internal hire), you find people who genuinely like to clean up disorganized messes. These people view the world differently from the majority of people who view database management as “grunt work” that’s beneath them.  They take pleasure in:

• Moving “freelance” data entry information into proper data fields (or creating new data fields)
• Finding and combining duplicate records
• Filling in missing records
• Discovering contacts that have fallen off the company’s radar
• Documenting opt-out email addresses and flagging bounced emails so they can be cleaned up and their value reclaimed
• Streamlining a coding system for better database segmentation

But what about poor Sam and his desperate nonprofit’s incompetent database? What can he do right now to fix the organization’s stuck-in-the-mud database? Is it beyond redemption?

Here are 4 starter ideas, all of which have an element of torture to them. But remember that ounce of prevention, pound of cure formula? Assign that database administrator today to cure your company’s incompetent database management by:

1. Exporting the data can into a spreadsheet
2. Forming a “database committee,” and having everyone go thru the information record by record
3. Paying someone to update ‘Acme Software’ with those changes. (If you don’t pay, and appoint a volunteer instead, this project will never be finished.)
4. Getting the software trainer out to show the Database Administrator how to add new contacts to the database, track the money and potential revenue, code the donors properly (volunteer, board member, etc.) and do queries the right way for direct mail letters or email appeals.

All contact management software has limitations. But if an organization has already paid for its CRM software, it should try to work with it–the right way. If an organization is trying to manage its contacts off Excel spreadsheets or an Outlook address book, my recommendation is to get ACT! Software. It’s the least expensive, most user-friendly contact management software available. There are so many ACT! users (over 2 million worldwide) that it’s easy to find Certified ACT! Consultants to help you structure your database properly and help you keep your database maintained.