It’s really all about relationships. I mean, organizing takes a lot of effort, especially if you’re keeping track of people, their interests and events. It’s just hard to get anything done without that. Customer relationship management tool can make a huge difference. CRM tools like fluentCRM, which is the tool that we use here that works with WordPress, it can help you maintain connections and track engagement and build a better network. And this guy kind of will help you understand why these tools are very useful for organizing our outreach and just how you can use it as well. First of all, it helps you centralize your contacts.

You know, if you’ve been doing some of these exercises, you’ve probably been dealing with a lot of contact information. Like you’ve got maybe more than one spreadsheet by now. This is going to help you centralize that information and avoid like having lots of spreadsheets and notes. It also helps you communicate those things with us. And like, if you’ve got a spreadsheet, right, how does it get to us and how do we integrate it with what we’ve got going on?

Well, internally we just train. We know how to do it and we figure it out. But also why even have to go through that at all? And this will let you group people based on what their interests are or how engaged they are, which means that you can reach out to them in a more targeted way. And what’s cool about fluentCRM and CRMs in general, these are customer relationship management tools. And keep that acronym in mind because I’m going to use the word CRM over and over. And that’s what we’re talking about, managing relationships.

It schedules stuff, it schedules your follow up emails, it schedules your reminders, it schedules your event invitations automatically. Part of what we were doing, having you do all of that tedious stuff by hand, is so that you understand what the software does logically and intuitively. It’s literally just like if you remember the Karate Kid. The kid is waxing on and waxing off. He’s learning valuable skills. He’s not just wasting time. You have now learned a lot of the basic fundamental skills and now you’re going to be able to make them automated, make them bigger, stronger, meet more people.

Part of this is using WordPress. You’re going to install WordPress and you can do this anywhere. And you can install and activate the Fluent CRM plugin. It’ll be in your dashboard. And there’s a free version of this. We got the paid version, but it does not matter because you can install WordPress on your literal computer, mess around with this and use the tool and see exactly how it works, get comfortable with it and all of that. If you’d like, you can even import your spreadsheet.

So if you had an organizing spreadsheet and now you’ve got the free Fluent CRM, you now have your own infrastructure now. So congratulations. If you’ve actually watched this and paid attention to it, you’re going to have fields like name, email, phone, and you’re going to organize them literally. And we also have things called segments and tags. This is literally how we sort y’ all at Mosaic. We tag you if you’re interested in the environment or if you’re interested in Palestine, or if you’re interested in unions, or if you’re interested in housing. There’s a little hashtag next to your name and, and we say you like these things so that when we talk to you, you’re not getting things that are irrelevant to your interests.

And we create segments based on those activities. All right, and you’ll be able to go through this campaigns tab and see how we create newsletters. One off, update emails and just make automations for having new volunteers or event invites. This stuff’s not easy necessarily, it takes a minute. But anybody that can follow a tutorial is going to be just all good here. And fluentCRM is great for an organizer. First of all, the reason why we use it, it’s all in one.

You know, your website and your contacts and your outreach. Like I can just be telling you about one tool. There are a lot of y’ all who are professionals and you know for a fact that I’m really describing like four or five different tools when I talk about using WordPress. But for somebody who’s new and doesn’t know all about how technology works, this is all in one and it’s cost effective, powerful features, not too expensive, and you also have control of your data. You know, it is on a server that you own. Like if you were to install WordPress on, on your computer, it’s your stuff and that gives you a little more privacy. There are other tools that you can use.

There’s Trello, there’s Jira, there’s Monday. It’s all the same stuff. But I’m just showing what we use right here, right now so that you can get in the mix. Look at those automations because you can see, okay, we can make follow up emails after events. Yeah, that’s how. What about outreach tracking? You can see who opens your emails, who unsubscribes who’s bored.

And it’s not just ideas, but it’s actual data. And this means that you can update your contacts and add new ones for accuracy. Integrating with the website, getting people to sign up to a mailing list, that’s a whole new thing for a whole nother day. But this is your introduction to fluentCRM, which can help you start organizing smarter, keep your connections in one place, keep you from feeling overwhelmed. Yeah. Get it set up on your website and experience the difference. And this will help you stay connected and keep an engaged community.

That’s your introduction to what fluentCRM is, how we use it, and how you can use it yourself.