Less CRM and more CollaboratorRM?

September 18, 2014 12:28 PM

Over the past year my role as a research project manager has expanded to include the management and tracking of dozens of conversations with potential collaborators (everything from individual scholars to large corporations), partners, (occasionally) funders, and others. I'm drowning in a flood of emails suggesting possible contacts, emails letting me know someone at my organization had a potentially productive conversation with a possible contact, emails from possible contacts introducing themselves, etc. I need a better system to keep track of this, but I'm not sure if standard CRM software is what I want. Help.

What I need to do:

1. Track contacts: name, affiliation, contact info, notes about how they want to collaborate
2. Track our conversations with these contacts: who last talked to them? when? about what?
3. Track and assign tasks coming out of these conversations: what are our next steps? When should we contact these people again?
4. Assign "owners" for these relationships—I need a system that will let me clearly label our relationships with Company Foo as belonging to Joe, so those within our organization with questions about Company Foo know to go to Joe before reaching out directly
5. Tag contacts/relationships by different project/department within my organization

What I don't need to do:

1. Mass email these people (or even small groups of these people)—each conversation is unique to the individual contact
2. Track sales of any sort

I'm having a hard time understanding if a standard CRM solution would even work here, and if so, which one might make the most sense. Cheap is good, free and open source is best, and the potential to integrate with a system we currently use (RT/Request Tracker, Redmine, Slack) is icing on the cake.

If a CRM is *not* what I need, what should I be looking for instead? Given my specific requirements, do I need to hack together two systems (one for contacts, one for tasks and owners?)?

posted by rebekah to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I would recommend Basecamp and Batchbook. They are lightweight, Batchbook is cheap and Basecamp has a free plan. Basecamp excels at a remote, collaborative taskmaster for projects and next steps that tracks conversations with individuals. Batchbook not really so great at task management but excellent with tracking conversations and organizing contacts with multiple relationships to multiple partners. Great social media integration for following what contacts are doing on twitter/instagram, etc. Both apps are not intended for sales and have little to no sales features. supposedly work good on mobile phones and tablets as well.
posted by caveatz at 12:58 PM on September 18, 2014

About how many contacts and how many users?
posted by michaelh at 1:04 PM on September 18, 2014

We're looking at around 50 contacts and 10 or so users now for the one specific effort, but if this goes well, we could be talking about 1000 contacts or more for 50 users.
posted by rebekah at 1:19 PM on September 18, 2014

I have been looking at email replacement slack which claims to sort if automagically do this.
posted by shothotbot at 2:02 PM on September 18, 2014

I'm moving from batch book to insightly (because of better google integration) but any crm that has decent tagging and/or special fields will do what you want. You need to sit down with pen and paper and sketch out what relationships to track - are you creating a Rolodex of people's skills? Making social maps of who knows who? Tracking how far they are from being acquaintance to partner? I have used tags to grab all the people who are in the medical field, have visited country X and haven't partnered with us yet but want to, and to track friendships among groups (for event planning). You basically need a custom folksonomy, not a custom crm.
posted by viggorlijah at 6:14 PM on September 18, 2014