I am in the process of setting up our CRM and work management system from scratch and I’m on the fence about the best way to set up our contacts in the CRM.
We deal with a range of different contacts/relationships that can cross over into multiple categories; donors, audience members, artists, students, schools, teachers, crew, venues, reviewers, government representatives, foundation/trust representatives, industry partners, corporate partners etc.
My instinct is to create one master list and then use filters to segment the contacts for different campaigns/reports, but then there’s the challenge and inconvenience of having a lot of categories that might never apply to some contacts. It feels weird though to have to have multiple entries for the same people if they happen to be an audience member and a donor, for example.
Am I overthinking this? I’d love to know what other orgs are doing.