Contents
Introduction
General Questions
Fundraising Questions
Membership Questions
Events Questions
Introduction
We strongly recommend that you create a written policies and procedures manual that is specific to your organization’s use of NeonCRM. The questions below are meant to help you think through your organization’s data and use of Neon in order to write a useful policies and procedures manual. Note that many of these questions are particularly important because the way that you enter data into Neon will have a major impact on reporting later on.
Remember, we already provide support guides with step-by-step instructions on how to do things in Neon. Your manual should focus on how your organization uses Neon as opposed to general instruction on how to use the system. Writing such a manual is best done once you are familiar with Neon and have made firm decisions about how you want to use the system.
Download a sample Policies and Procedures Manual for NeonCRM here.
Please note: This is a framework for creating a policies and procedures manual that addresses the different parts of the system you may be using. There are many sections that do not contain content. Other sections you will want to modify to meet your own organizational standards.
General Questions
- What fields do you want to make sure are always completed?
- What reports do you want to make sure that you are able to regularly run? [Related guides: Reporting Guides]
- Do you have a general convention for how things should be entered? For example, "Suite" is always "Ste." or campaigns should always be entered with the year at the end, i.e. "Annual Appeal 2015."
- At what point should a person receive a full account in your NeonCRM system?
- How important are family relationships? [Related guide: Households]
- Do you want every family member to have their own account? [Related guide: Contact Records]
- How important are company relationships? [Related guide: Company Contacts]
- Do you want every employee to have their own account or are they primarily interacted with as company contacts?
- Is there custom data that you track about your constituents? [Related guide: Configuring Custom Fields]
- Do you separate your constituents into certain types? [Related guide: Individual and Company Types]
- What are the goals your organization has set for this fiscal year, five years from now, ten years from now?
- What are the metrics you are measuring those goals by? (i.e. Money Raised, Volunteer #’s, Event Attendance, Population Served)
Fundraising Questions
- What are the required fields that you want to collect about donors? [Related guide: Customizing Standard Web Forms]
- Do donations qualify people for different roles/relationship levels with your organization?
- How do you manage donation dates - for example, is the donation date today's date or the date on the check for the donation?
- What is your fiscal year and how important is it to your reporting? [Related guide: Update Your Organization Profile]
- How do you classify or break up donations (i.e. restricted, unrestricted, endowment)?
Membership Questions
- What is a member according to your organization?
- Does your organization have yearly memberships and how is membership achieved? [Related guide: Membership Settings]
- Are there multiple levels of membership?
- Are there different privileges for different levels of members?
- How do you handle membership renewals?
Events Questions
- How many events do you run per year and what kind of event are they (i.e. fundraising, providing a service, conferences, volunteer events)? [Related guide: Creating Events]
- Who are the audiences that you target for those events?
- How will you communicate with those audiences?
- How will people register for the events?
- How will you use event registration/attendance data in the future?
- How connected are your events and your fundraising?