The information in your CRM can be useful for many things including sending email newsletters to your Contacts (people) and cross-promoting with your Local Connections⢠which are made up of Companies & Causes (organizations).
To help you stay organized and speed up using Locable's many tools, you can create Local Networks which are groups of businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations.
Why use Local Networks?
You likely use our Community Calendar, Directory, job board, volunteer opportunities board, and other embeds to include content from local organizations automatically. Likewise, you may use Express Email Newsletters to distribute content to your email subscribers.
In all cases, you can add businesses one-by-one however that's repetitive, time-consuming, and can lead to mistakes - oops, I forgot to include businesses in my directory đ¤Ś
Create Local Networks to group businesses however you'd, we often see Local Networks used to:
group businesses by industry i.e. Restaurants, Retailers, Professional Service
group businesses by participation i.e. Accepts Downtown Dollars
group business by activities i.e. has live music
group businesses as sponsors or other sorts of supporters i.e. Summer Concert Series 2022 Sponsors
A single business or nonprofit can be in multiple Local Networks and as a rule, a network should have multiple or even many businesses i.e. don't make them too narrow. It's kind of like adding a song to a playlist.
Most businesses and nonprofits Local Networks will be more simple
In most cases, you may simply have two local networks - Businesses and Nonprofits.
As you create and manage the various Local Connections⢠website embeds and Express Email, you can use these networks to quickly add or remove business, filter content etc.
Using Local Networks
You can add or remove Companies & Causes from Local Networks in a couple of different ways:
by editing the Local Network to add or remove businesses
or by editing the Company's CRM record directly in the Companies & Causes section
If you remove a company from a Local Network on it's CRM record, you won't see it 'removed' from associated Local Connections⢠tools until you click save. At that point, all of the tools that reference the Local Network will be updated to reflect the change.
In summary, use Local Networks so that a single change can be reflected across all of your calendars, directories, job boards, etc. when both adding or removing Companies & Contacts while also making it faster for you to find content to share in your email newsletters.
Note, if a business is part of multiple Local Networks that are included in a tool they will only appear one time i.e. a directory that includes many networks will still only show each business once.