PublicInput.com’s integrated CRM (Constituent Relationship Manager) helps you manage your engagement data and see information about all your participants. It is the foundational database of the public input system. If you haven't turned it on yet, let the customer success team know you would like to.
Using CRM, you can:
- View participants across a variety of different activities
- Segment participants based on various factors – interest, location, demographics, etc. – and quickly access all participants in that area to re-engage them through email outreach
- Manage your relationship with them
- Track activities, potentially in such a way that allows you to understand how optimally to engage with your constituents
- Generate meaningful reports using the information gathered from the CRM system
To get started, click CRM in the left-hand navigation panel.
The CRM administrative page is the user-friendly graphical interface we use to:
- Interrogate the database for information about its participants and manage user profiles
- Categorize users by segments
- Report on activities
What makes CRM so powerful is its ability to intelligently link data – from campaigns and activities to participant profiles and distinct user groups – internally across the system. From this data, you can analyze the effect of your campaigns and fine-tune your engagement strategies with different interest groups.
The way the CRM manages links is primarily through emails. (Telephone numbers are secondary contacts.) If a participant does not have an email address, they are usually an anonymous participant and there is no meaningful way to link them in the system to other data.
Having a participant’s email address allows you to manage and connect participants’ activities across all participation points in the engagement process.
A. Manage participant profiles
In the Participants section, you can view all the participants in the system and view their individual profiles.
To view a participant profile, click on a participant name.
In the Participant information popup, you can:
- Edit a user’s details, e.g. their telephone number or location
- View a user’s activities – e.g. what surveys they recently participated in, what segments they belong to, where they are located, etc. –, log new activities or associate an activity with a new project (note: if your are manually adding an activity, do not include brackets such as '<>' because this will affect the upload of information).
Manage segments
To create a new segment, click Create New Segment.
You can create different kinds of segments (groups), based on different factors, e.g. based on participants’ location, their attendance at a particular event, or their answers to a questionnaire.
Reporting
To generate an activity report, click Reporting.
Download Activity – Specify the date range for the report.
Filter by segment – Select a specific group you wish to report on from the drop-down list or report on all segments.
Click Download Activity Summary to generate your report.
The report will cover all activities for the specified period and selected segment(s), from email outreach to meeting attendance events.
See also: Learn more about segments.