Unlocking Involvements

If you are like most organizations, prior to Maestro you kept all of your information in a series of lists. You had a list for your membership, another list for all your businesses. You had lists for each committee, each event, and so on and so on. If you wanted to get a complete picture of all the ways a contact or business was engaging with your organization you had to go through each of these various lists. Now, with your data in Maestro it is as simple as adding involvements.

By adding involvements you can now track every volunteer opportunity, sponsorship given, event attended and much, much more. In fact, you can track virtually anything your organization can think up. In addition, you can create involvement categories, which allows you to group all your involvements together. Adding these involvements to your contacts, businesses, and properties allows you to track all their activities within your organization in one easy place.

Once you have setup your involvements and added them to the profiles, you now can log in and see exactly how the contact, business or property is doing with your organization. This allows your staff and volunteers to quickly check a profile before making a phone call or stopping in for a visit. This leads to more engaging conversations, which leads to better results for the organization.

This can seem like a daunting task. You have so many things you may not know where to start. Rest assured there is no right or wrong way to go, but let us offer some suggestions:

1. Start with your volunteers. This allows you to generate lists (which can be used for mailing labels etc) as the year goes on.
2. Create your structure. How are you going to group your involvements? What are you tracking? Once you set your structure the rest starts to fall into place.
3. Use your staff or volunteers. If you have a committee for a large event, ask them to add the involvements specific to their event or committee. One of the great things about Maestro is that it allows multiple people to work with the information, so share the work load.
4. Remember that you can do it in steps or phases. You have a lot of data, and you may not get it all done overnight. That’s ok. Get to things as you come to them. For instance, when you enter a sponsorship that you secured, or when someone signs up to volunteer.

It’s been said before, but it is worth repeating. There is no right or wrong way to handle your organization’s involvements. The key is to get started. If you’d like to talk to one of our Maestro experts about your involvements and getting started, give us a call today!