Quorum releases new CRM for public affairs teams

Ever been caught digging through your email inbox, searching for the information for that one very useful contact? What you need is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

CRMs, like D.C.-based Contactually (other popular names include HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.), allow those of us in the business of interacting with people to keep track of, and easily keep in touch with, those people.

One job where there are lots of people to keep track of? Public affairs. And yet, there’s no CRM platform built specifically with the needs of public affairs professionals in mind — until now.

Quorum Analytics, the downtown D.C.-based startup known for legislative tracking software, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new product — a CRM for public affairs. It’s called Quorum Stakeholder Engagement.

“Stakeholder Engagement takes all the information traditionally scattered across spreadsheets or old email threads and puts it in one place,” cofounder Alex Wirth said in a statement. “We’ve built a platform that facilitates efficient workflow and maintains your team’s institutional knowledge.”

The platform isn’t just for organization, though — it also features tools like Quorum Outbox which allows users to send personalized emails to stakeholders given HTML templates. “The goal is to not only help teams organize stakeholder information, but to provide tools that enable them to interact and strategize around that information,” Wirth said.

So why does a public affairs professional use Quorum Stakeholder Engagement instead of another CRM option? Interestingly, Wirth told Technical.ly in an email, “most of the public affairs professionals in our target market are not currently using a CRM. The most common thing I’ve seen is people using an excel spreadsheet where they list their stakeholders and then keep track of them from there.”

And not only is using a CRM at all an upgrade on this situation (think of the email conundrum above), but this CRM is built specifically with public affairs needs in mind. For example it integrates with Quorum’s existing software products, meaning “public affairs teams can keep all of their stakeholder engagement efforts with elected and not elected stakeholders in the same place.”

“Big differentiator here is that this is the first CRM platform designed exclusively for public affairs — others have tried to adapt sales or marketing CRMs to public affairs but it doesn’t work as well as a solution built specifically for the public affairs industry,” Wirth said.

Wirth told Technical.ly that the product has been in the works for a while — a result of listening for unmet client needs.