Resource Review #5: Highrise CRM from 37Signals

http://highrisehq.com/

What: A contact-management oriented CRM from the company 37Signals.

Why: This is the CRM we use at Wendt library. It was recommended to us by Eric Larson, formerly of Wendt Library. Eric now works for the UW-Madison Library Technology Group.

Summary: For privacy issues, I'm not going to post anything from our CRM, but Highrise has a video tour of the software.

Highrise is a basic, easy-to-use CRM. The price ranges from $30/month for a single user to $150/month for unlimited users. It is a cloud application and allows for file storage as well. 37Signals also had other types of CRM that are organized in different ways; check out their site for more information.

Contacts generally consist of people, departments, or vendors; basically any entity you will have a long-term relationship with. You add tasks related to contacts and tag contacts to organize them in customized ways. "Deals" are a way you can organize projects you have which involve multiple contacts. Finally, you subscribe to RSS feeds related to contacts or deals.

Software Evaluation: I like this software a lot. I started using it my first day on the job; it's very intuitive and I never had any problems with it. The few times we've had to contact 37Signals with questions, they have always responded very quickly.

Wendt is a medium-sized academic library. We currently use Highrise for reserves, and are in the process of expanding it out for use by departmental liaisons, instruction librarians, and technical services folks.

Conclusion: The semantics are still very business-oriented, and it's not open source so that can't be changed. Possibly not affordable for very tiny libraries, but in general the cost is very low ($3/person for the group versions, vs. $20-50/person for the group versions of CRM giants like Sugar and Salesforce), and it's really worked quite well for us. Overall I would give this an A-.