As I am settling into my role as Director of Technology-Enhanced Instruction for Jamestown Community College, I am trying to find the best way to help extremely busy faculty develop skills and knowledge. I am finding they do not have time to attend training or even read newsletters we provide. We are realizing very quickly that we need to personalize our approach more. To do that, my team needs an effective way to share information about those we serve. One solution we are exploring is the use of a customer relationship management (CRM) program.
CRM programs are a common tool in business used to help personalize service. With a CRM, I can review an individual’s record and see what previous support I provided. The CRM program we are currently exploring is called Insight.ly. Let me tell you about the program. I also believe this is a great tool for my friends in Extension, and I will describe a process how they could benefit.
About Insight.ly
Insight.ly allows you to manage your contacts, tasks, and relationships from a computer or a mobile device. Insight.ly can show you interactions made across your entire team.
Home
The Home screen shows you a list of all recent activity across your entire team. This list can be filtered by activity and user.
Example of Insight.ly Home screen
Tasks
Tasks can be found under the Tasks tab. Tasks can be filtered by status, user, and category. New tasks can be created from this screen and tasks can have deadlines. Additionally, tasks can be closed from this screen.
Example of Insight.ly Tasks screen
Contacts
Contacts is where the magic happens. Contacts can be imported from other applications or added through a Web form.
Contacts can be filtered by date added or through a custom query. Additionally, contacts can be filtered by tags that you can add to each contact.
Example of Insight.ly Contact List screen
Each contact contains information you choose to save on the individual, associated emails, notes, tasks, files, and events. Contacts can be linked together based on relationship such as parent-child or boss-employee.
Example of Insight.ly Contact screen
When you filter the contact list, you can carry out a variety of tasks: add tags, add links, invite to a Google+ hangout, add notes, or send an email. It is even possible to send the list to Mailchimp.
Example of Insight.ly filtered contact list
Organizations
Insight.ly also allows you to maintain information about organizations.
Example of Insight.ly Organization list.
Other features
Insight.ly also allows you to track opportunities and projects. So far, I have not explored these features but will in the near future.
To help facilitate the use of this product, Insight.ly created a unique email address for each user and project. If you send an email to a contact and include one of these email addresses as a cc or bcc, it will automatically associate the email with the client or project inside of Insight.ly.
There are also a number variables that can be adjusted in the systems settings.
This program has already helped our team keep better tabs on the folks we serve. I am confident it could help other organizations such as Extension.
How Extension could use Insight.ly
Although I no longer work for Extension, I am always looking for ways this organization can provide even better service. Extension carries out exceptional programming for long term customers as well as new ones. By strengthening relations with current clients, they can focus on their needs and deliver programming to attend to those needs.
By including relative tags to each contact, Extension educators could target messaging to specific clients rather than distributing event announcements to those who are not likely to attend.
With the Web to Leads form that you can place on your Web page, you can make a call to individuals who want to know more about Extension programming. Connect with the individuals who want to hear your message.
If you are an Extension educator and start to use this program, I would like to hear your experience.
