Case management is an important part of an effective CRM. Dealing with complicated processes and reducing the administrative burden while also making sure they are linked to all the other relevant information is one of the most important functions great case management software can do.
This is one of the reasons we’ve spent so much time over the years building out CiviCRM’s case management functionality, making it easier for nonprofits to have a fantastic intuitive interface that can serve all their needs. Today we’ll be discussing 3 different ways CiviCRM makes case management easy.
Before we jump into the how, let’s start with the definitions. What do we consider a ‘case’ within CiviCRM? You might well be thinking that you don’t handle ‘cases’ internally - but the ‘case management’ part of CiviCRM is something that practically every organisation can take advantage of. At its core, it’s really a process management system.
We’ve already written about application management in the past, a subsection of the case functionality we’ve built out within Civi to provide a robust interface whether it’s for membership, grants, volunteers, awards or whatever application process your organisation might run. Our case management module can handle any type of simple or multi-stage application process from start to finish, and handle multiple processes at once!
The case management system is also capable of handling prospecting pipelines. This functionality can be very useful in circumstances like when you’re looking to attract new major donors, manage grants applications, nurture new members, or even partners and want to keep track of all your activities and stages of progress.
One of the best things about using a powerful case management like CiviCRM is having a centralised dashboard. Being able to see what stage each of your cases are on a live interactive dashboard makes it easy to understand your entire workflows and pipelines at a glance. Rather than having to dig into different tabs or even spreadsheets, you can see all the basic details from one location and easily click into any specific case to see more specific details.
The case dashboard in CiviCRM is actually something Compuco has done substantial work to redesign and make more intuitive and user friendly within our Shoreditch theme. If you’d like to make your case dashboard match up with the image below, you can find the extension here.
Keeping track of all your interactions and tasks on any given case or process is vital. From within an individual case in Civi you can take a look at your entire history and keep track of what you’ve got up to in that past, what you still need to do, including anything that might be overdue, and if anyone else in your team might have interacted with your case. You can even set up template timelines of tasks too that can be generated when a case is created. This can save considerable time and help keep repeated processes on track.
By default, this will be in a table, but with Compuco’s extension mentioned above this will instead be in an intuitive and easy to read timeline view.
One of the ways CiviCRM can make your life easier is by automatically handling lots of the communications that will be necessary throughout your process. You can establish triggers such as the end of a certain task, or a stage change, and then tell the system to email the people relevant to the case.
This can all be personalised using tokens (often also known as merge tags) to ensure these emails remain personal and so that relevant case information from fields can be automatically inserted into the body of your message.
Where this really helps is that it means you never need to worry about if an email has been sent out or not. The automation will automatically have done it for you! This is exceedingly useful if you’re running different processes at different stages all at the same time. Instead, you can simply read a report or check the record and see that it’s all been taken care of for you. This game changer frees up a lot of time and ensures communications are sent out swiftly, with nothing falling through the cracks, keeping everyone in the loop.
We’ve only just scratched the surface here of what CiviCRM’s case management tool can do to make it so much simpler to handle cases for you and your team. There are so many other great features, such as the ability to upload files, trigger other records to update on occasions like when a case closes and so much more!
If you’d like to chat case management with us, please get in touch today. We’re always happy to help!
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