How to use Trello as a CRM for membership organizations
Running a club, sports team, theatre group, or study group? Here's how to improve communication and engagement within your membership organization with Email for Trello, using a relationship management tool that most people think is just for business.
Trello is a great workflow solution for all kinds of membership organizations. The flexible, Kanban-style layout makes it adaptable to your unique needs, so that you can stay organized and collaborate with your team on everything from enquiries and outreach, to membership management, event organization, and other projects your organisation is responsible for.
The Email for Trello Power-Up takes things one step further with CRM features for organizing your member's contact details and emails, so that you can focus on creating a great experience for them. In this article, we take a look at:
What customer relationship management (CRM) is
Why CRM and contact management are useful for membership organizations
How to use Trello as a CRM with the Email for Trello Power-Up
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system that helps organizations manage their interactions with existing and potential members.
Why is CRM important for membership organizations?
An effective CRM can help organizations build and manage their relationships, and maintain open channels of communication. This is helpful for many different kinds of membership organizations:
Sports clubs like five-a-side football or chess clubs
Professional groups for community-led growth like networking groups or industry-specific communities
Paid subscriptions like Substack or Patreon groups that offer additional content and events for paid subscribers
Homeowner associations or body corporates
Shareholder committees that need to organize AGMs
Parent-teacher associations looking to arrange meetings or extra-curricular activities
For membership organizations, an up-to-date and organized database of contacts is a key part of effective CRM, so it’s important to have the right tools for the job.
How to manage your contacts with Email for Trello
The Email for Trello Power-Up makes it possible to connect a shared email address to your Trello board, so that you can manage your contacts, emails and tasks – all in one place. Our advanced CRM features help membership organizations to:
Keep accurate records. Organizations can maintain a comprehensive database of contacts, notes and email conversations.
Communicate effectively. A clear overview of incoming emails and ongoing internal discussions means that everyone is always on the same page.
Collaborate in real time. Greater visibility also makes it much easier to collaborate with team members, prioritize to-dos and allocate resources.
Let’s take a closer look at how contact management works in Email for Trello, so that your membership organization can get the most out of our powerful CRM features.
See all email activity at a glance
The activity feed shows recent activity from your current board or all the mailboxes in your workspace. This includes inbound and outbound emails, as well as contact notes.
The Email for Trello activity feed makes all your emails, contacts and tasks visible at a glance
This helps teams to keep their finger on the pulse, and improves collaboration.
Easily manage your contacts
Anyone you engage with via Email for Trello will be automatically created as a contact, with a dynamic avatar based on their name (if they’ve set a Gravatar, you’ll see that instead). Click through to any individual contact to see recent activity related to them, including how many emails you have sent and received.
View custom notes, activity and statistics for each contact
Teams can also make record-keeping easier with custom notes:
Add, remove and edit notes associated with a contact
Pin a note to fix it to the top of a contact (and unpin it when it’s no longer needed)
For example, you might want to add custom notes for member birthdays, specific requests, or even reminders for other people in your team.
Import and export contacts
No more manual data entry! Easily import and export contacts to and from Trello with our intuitive import and export functionality.
Import contacts via .csv upload
💡 TIP Use our downloadable CSV template to help you quickly upload your contacts.
Group contacts by organization
Email for Trello makes it possible to group contacts by organization so that your team can keep contacts organized by company.
This is especially useful for professional membership organizations that are managing contacts across multiple companies. Team members can see all conversations in the context of a single organization, making it easy to keep track of the bigger picture.
Group your contacts automatically based on their email address
💡 TIP After you’ve imported a contact list, Email for Trello recognizes similar email addresses and automatically groups them by organization.
Transform your CRM with email in Trello
By making Trello the central hub for all your contacts, notes and emails, Email for Trello empowers your membership organization to streamline communication, enhance collaboration and build long-lasting relationships.
