Grind it Out: Contact Sync for Nonprofits

Today's post comes from our partners at Cirrus Insight.

Legendary Ohio State University football coach Woody Hayes was famous for coaching a hard-nosed, physical football team. “Three yards and a cloud of dust” was his philosophy, and, to this day, most football fans could tell you what that means. It’s more than just a heavy running attack. It’s a commitment to playing a certain type of football--the grind-it-out, every-inch-counts, attention-to-detail brand that is idolized at all levels of the game. When you hear a football coach say that he wants to have a strong defense and running game, you can be pretty sure that he’s going to count on his players picking up as much dust, so to speak, as possible.

Your nonprofit should work the same way.

No, I’m not suggesting that your social justice organization start kicking up clouds of dust out in the streets (that’s a value judgment we can’t really make here at Cirrus Insight). But you can grind it out. The lesson to take from Woody Hayes and the many, many disciples of this brand of football is just that: grind it out. That means never passing up an opportunity, never giving up a chance to make a prospect or contact. In the Woody Hayes system, you can’t give up a play based on the math. “Three yards and a cloud of dust” implies that you need those three yards and some dust every single time to get a first down in three tries.

Again, your nonprofit should work the same way.

Making sure that you keep tabs on every prospect or contact is vitally important to growing your donor base and increasing donor revenue. That’s why we’ve added Contact Sync to our Cirrus Insight app. We want to enable Salesforce and Gmail users to have as many donations as possible and make it easy to access them. So if you’re going on an advancement trip to San Francisco, you can sync all of your contacts that are listed under “San Francisco” in Salesforce right to Gmail. This exponentially improves your chances at getting more support, even if you only make people consider your cause--maybe you move them from 0% chance of donation to 15% or 25%. That’ll add up in the long run.

It’s also why we’ve partnered with RingLead to bring Contact Capture to the Gmail inbox. Creating contacts from Gmail is one of our original and best features, and now we do it for you automatically. When you choose to create a new lead or contact, Cirrus Insight will scan the email, find the signature and parse the information in it. If we find contact information, Cirrus Insight will ask if you want to use that information when creating the contact. If you do, Cirrus Insight will then automatically load that data into the appropriate form, making it quick and painless to add more contacts.

WIth both of these features, Cirrus Insight is a powerhouse for improving behavior. Your team will adopt Salesforce more. They’ll input more data and better data. We currently offer a 50% discount for nonprofits, too, as well as a 14-day free trial.

Geoff Bokuniewicz is a senior majoring in Writing/Communications at Maryville College. In his spare time, he enjoys watching hockey, hiking, and listening to the entirety of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”