My first reaction was “this is just basic best practice for any people-/relationship-focused role, obviously community builders should have CRMs”.
Then I realised none of the leaders of the student group I was most active in had CRMs (to my knowledge) and I would have been maybe a bit creeped out if they had, which updated me in the other direction.
Then I thought about it more and realised that group was very far in the direction of “friends with a common interest hang out”, and that for student groups that were less like that I’m still basically pro CRMs. This feels obviously true for “advocacy” groups (anything explicitly religious or political, but also e.g. environmentalist groups, sustainability groups, help-your-local-community groups, anything do-goody). But I think I’d be in favour of even relatively neutral groups (e.g. student science club, student orchestras, etc) doing this.
Given how hard it is to keep any student group alive across multiple generations of leadership, not having a CRM is starting to seem very foolhardy to me.
I do community building with a (non-student, non-religious, non-EA) group that talks a lot about pretty sensitive topics, and we explicitly ask for permission to record things in the CRM. We don’t ask “can we put you in our database?”; we phrase it as “hey, I’d love to connect you with XYZ folks in the chapter who have ABC in common with you, would you mind if I take some notes on what we talked about today, so I can share with them later?” But we take pretty seriously the importance of consent and privacy in the work that we’re doing.
Also, as someone who was in charge of recruitment at a sorority in college where ~half the student body was Greek-affiliated… yeah, community builders should have CRMs. We just don’t call them CRMs; we call them “Potential New Member Sheet” or something.
It does feel a bit slimy, but I think this is pretty normal, and if done well, not likely to put off the folks we’re worried about.
I keep going back and forth on this.
My first reaction was “this is just basic best practice for any people-/relationship-focused role, obviously community builders should have CRMs”.
Then I realised none of the leaders of the student group I was most active in had CRMs (to my knowledge) and I would have been maybe a bit creeped out if they had, which updated me in the other direction.
Then I thought about it more and realised that group was very far in the direction of “friends with a common interest hang out”, and that for student groups that were less like that I’m still basically pro CRMs. This feels obviously true for “advocacy” groups (anything explicitly religious or political, but also e.g. environmentalist groups, sustainability groups, help-your-local-community groups, anything do-goody). But I think I’d be in favour of even relatively neutral groups (e.g. student science club, student orchestras, etc) doing this.
Given how hard it is to keep any student group alive across multiple generations of leadership, not having a CRM is starting to seem very foolhardy to me.
I do community building with a (non-student, non-religious, non-EA) group that talks a lot about pretty sensitive topics, and we explicitly ask for permission to record things in the CRM. We don’t ask “can we put you in our database?”; we phrase it as “hey, I’d love to connect you with XYZ folks in the chapter who have ABC in common with you, would you mind if I take some notes on what we talked about today, so I can share with them later?” But we take pretty seriously the importance of consent and privacy in the work that we’re doing.
Also, as someone who was in charge of recruitment at a sorority in college where ~half the student body was Greek-affiliated… yeah, community builders should have CRMs. We just don’t call them CRMs; we call them “Potential New Member Sheet” or something.
It does feel a bit slimy, but I think this is pretty normal, and if done well, not likely to put off the folks we’re worried about.