About Michigan CRM

Today the University has an enormous number of different and disparate Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) systems both large and small. These systems each manage either small or large portions of full lifecycle interactions (recruitment, admittance, retention) with students, their parents, faculty and alumni.

The Michigan CRM Community of Practice aims to build a strategy that more closely integrates these systems together into a common, powerful ecosystem. This will increase U-M productivity; improve results and most importantly, improve the experience for students, their parents, faculty and alumni and help provide one consistent voice and record of communications.

Strategic Goals

• Track full life-cycle of constituents (prospect to donor) and increase recruiting options for all student populations. Program and approach that aligns business processes and functions with constituent and institutional priorities.

• Promote organizational and process alignment around CRM as an important principle as part of the University's IT capabilities. Manage an “ecosystem” of CRM products on campus as part of this strategic framework by meeting the various needs of stakeholders while maintaining data interoperability. Reduce the number of existing (supplementary, shadow) systems if they do not fit in the framework.

• Build a campus-wide strategy so that our relationships are cohesive, we establish shared vision and goals, and can set accurate expectations of unit contributions in terms of time commitments and costs.

• Align new initiatives with existing systems as well as shared vision and goals.

• Continue the investments already made in existing enterprise-class systems such as DART and MCompass.

Action Items

• Build a community around the use of CRM on campus. By definition, CRM onlys works if we have a comprehensive U-M-wide "view" of our constituents.

• Establish a community of practitioners that will drive adoption and foster best practices.

• Establish strong data and systems governance so that our data is both protected and available to do University business better.