Art engagement

In 2011/12, 63.3 per cent of adults in England engaged with the arts three or more times, compared with 78.2 per cent of adults who engaged at least once.

Over two thirds of adults attended at least one arts event in 2011/12 compared with just under half who participated in at least one activity.

Free time activities

In 2011/12, 90.2 per cent of adults reported watching TV as their main free time activity, followed by spending time with friends or family (87.3%) and listening to music (79.0%).

Over three quarters of adults read for pleasure at least once a week and over a quarter of adults visit the cinema at least once a month.

Just over a half of adults (56.4%) read a daily newspaper at least three times a week, with the Sun (17.1%) and the Daily Mail (16.2%) being the most popular daily newspapers to read.

Wellbeing

Engagement with a wide range of cultural activities including heritage, arts and museum and galleries was associated with significantly higher levels of subjective happiness.

Engagement with museums and galleries was associated with greater levels of happiness amongst females.

Child engagement

In 2011/12, the majority of children had engaged with the arts in the last year – 98.6 per cent of 5-10 year olds and 99.8 per cent of 11-15 year olds.

71.9 per cent of 5-10 year olds and 72.8 per cent of 11-15 year olds had visited a heritage site in the last 12 months.

Advantages of Capsule CRM

• It’s extremely cost effective – just £8 per use per month as at May 2012 (a free edition is also available for up to 250 contacts)
• Far and away the biggest benefit of Capsule is its ease of use – it has a beautiful, simple design that users find intuitive.  Little things like being able to customise your colours, immediately make the system more welcoming for new organisations
• As per other cloud based systems, it’s fully hosted with access via a secure web link which makes it perfect for accessing from any laptop, computer or mobile device (it has an iphone app too which is perfect for small business like mine on the road to see clients)
• I love the import process – one of the simplest I’ve come across, which makes it an easy system to implement for clients.  It also means you can recommend that the client still carries on with their favourite ecommerce or emarketing software in the knowledge that new contacts can easily be imported into Capsule as the ‘main CRM’ system on a weekly or monthly basis
• Fantastic duplicate management tools – the import tells you immediately if there are any potential dupes and gives you the opportunity not to import them.  The individual ‘merge’ processes are also very user friendly
• Tags can be automatically created on import – perfect if the imported field doesn’t require a Custom Field approach.  Users can also create their own bespoke tags as they use the system, without accessing settings to do so.  There is a fantastic ‘clean up’ tool to delete any unused tags.  You can also add a tag automatically to anyone on your list  in a matter of seconds – perfect!
• With an import, it cleverly picks up ‘Organisation Name‘ on someone’s record and creates the organisation automatically so you’ll find the Organisation record with all the employees linked to it after import
• In this day and age, integration with an emarketing system is essential but not all CRM systems have it - Capsule CRM integrates with Mailchimp offering a perfect solution
• The security can be adjusted so that only some users can use the bulk export option – ideal if you’re an arts organisation reliant on volunteers to add new records to your database
• Creating custom fields is very easy – essential for Data Protection settings, and ideal for keeping similar ‘tags’ together
• Fantastic integration with Google Apps so an email can easily be stored against the customer record.  If you don’t have Google Apps, you’re given a special ‘dropbox’ email address which you can bcc into any communication so that the email is added to the customer record.  The ability to add notes and attachments makes it ideal for arts organisations looking to keep track of funding applications and correspondence with artists, board, VIPs etc.

Disadvantages of Capsule CRM

• The List functionality is very intuitive, but it doesn’t allow you to pick multiple fields or utilise OR relationships.  So you can create a list of Artists in the Midlands (Artist Tag and a Midlands Tag, all relationships are assumed to be ‘AND’), but you can’t use one list to give you everyone in the Midlands, North East or North West.  This is because ‘multi-select’ isn’t permitted and there is no ‘OR’ setting.  This seems pretty fundamental to me and something I’d hope will be resolved.  There is a work around though – you can first create your Midlands lists, add a tag of ’2012 May Mailing’, then do that with the next list and so on.  When you’ve created the mailing list you’d like, simply create the total mailing list based on the tag
• New tags cannot be imported automatically for existing records, so if the data was ‘cleaned’ and Gone Aways identified they would have to be changed manually – for organisations with over 10,000 records this simply isn’t viable.  One option would be for you to export the full data (a great feature of Capsule), make your changes, wipe all your database data and start with a clean, new upload.  It’s an option but a pretty scary one for most organisations!  You’d also have to check what happens with attachments, emails etc.
• Support is only via email (no telephone support), but I’ve found Capsule to be very quick and helpful with email responses.  If you’re in the US, the UK hours of the email support might be a consideration for you – support isn’t 24/7, but that said, you shouldn’t need support that often for this system

Summary

Capsule CRM is a very user friendly system, with a lot of brilliant functionality.  It’s extremely cost effective and the process of migration is very easy – within around three business days I can migrate most small businesses (consolidating a few different existing databases) onto the system.  I personally love the fact the business is based in the UK – being a UK based company myself, it’s great to support a ‘local’ software supplier when so many of my other software suppliers are based in the US.

For my own marketing consultancy business, I’ve been delighted with the system and love the integration with Google Apps so that important emails and proposals can be very easily stored against customer records.  Ensure you’re familiar with the limitations of the system listed above, and if those don’t pose a problem for your business I’d definitely recommend migrating onto Capsule – leave those address books and Excel spreadsheets behind you!

In September 2011, I evaluated CRM systems for a contemporary art gallery.  It was a fantastic opportunity to look generally at the CRM market place and consider what CRM system I should have in place for my own marketing consultancy business.

At the outset I had a number of requirements in mind including: the security of data (based on the supplier assurances and, for US suppliers, the Safe Harbor scheme); lists; custom fields; bulk email; online data capture; mobile access; back ups; auto-updates and fundraising capability.  I also wanted to look for a system that would allow a bulk update of existing records using external analysis – such as exporting your data for Mosaic matching, or Suppression matching and being able to update the respective records on bulk within the system.

My top four cloud CRM systems for a small business or an arts organisation that doesn’t need a ticketing system are:

1.      Capsule CRM, £8 per user per month (full review)

In a nutshell:  Growing UK Based company offering a simple budget solution

2.      Sugar CRM, five users (minimum level) for $1800 per year (around £1200 at current exchange rate)

In a nutshell: good functionality and friendly customer service

3.      Sales Force Professional Edition, £45 per user per month

In a nutshell: The market leader for cloud based CRM systems

4.      Zoho CRM, free for up to 3 users, or $12 per user per month

In a nutshell: Popular free/budget solution with a few notable restrictions

Comparison

Overall, I was surprised not to find a cloud CRM system with high quality emarketing functionality included – it would easily be possible for many of the leading email providers to be an ‘all in one’ CRM solution by extending their functionality slightly to include the possibility of postal lists and expand the contact data fields.  For many small businesses with fairly basic CRM requirements, an alternative would be to select an emarketing provider with good contact data fields and use the system for their postal mailings as well.

I concentrated on those products marketing themselves as CRM systems as I knew that my client required more than basic contact data functionality.  During my reviews, I took out a license with all four systems and tried to do basic data imports and some of the typical day to day tasks I knew that my clients would use.  A quick summary of my comparisons are here:

What system did I select?

For both my own business, and my art gallery client, I selected Capsule CRM.  My choice was largely based on the trial I took out with each system –  Capsule CRM was by far the most intuitive system with lots of lovely features.  For clients who have previously been using Excel or address books, it’s not a difficult transition which is a big plus.

Interested in a full review of each system?

We’ve written a fuller review of Capsule CRM.  We’ll be writing fuller reviews of the other CRM systems soon… watch this space!

The Excel functions used are: =Proper(A2) and =Upper(A2).

It uses two techniques – the first using the ‘Remove Duplicates’ button in Excel 2010 and the second using a formula which allows you to see the duplicates individually before removing them.  The formula used in the video is: =IF(A2=A3,”Duplicate”,).