How to Organize Your Companies & Causes CRM Using Local Networks

Local Networks enable you to save time by creating reusable groups of businesses in your CRM

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 or categories 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, like forgetting to include businesses in your directory.

Creating Local Networks

Create Local Networks to group businesses. We often see Local Networks used to:

• group businesses by industry i.e. Restaurants, Retailers, Professional Service

• group businesses by participation i.e. Members, 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 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. Think of it like adding a song to a playlist.

For most businesses and nonprofits, Local Networks will be simple and streamlined. 

For example, 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.

Adding Companies to Your Local Networks

You can add or remove Companies & Causes from Local Networks in a couple of different ways:

1. By editing the Local Network to add or remove businesses

2. OR by editing the Company's CRM record directly in the Companies & Causes section

If you remove a company from a Local Network in its CRM record, you won't see it 'removed' from associated Local Connections™ tools until you click Save Company Details. At that point, all of the tools that reference the Local Network will be updated to reflect the change.

In summary, you'll want to 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. This also makes it faster for you to find content to share in your Express Email Newsletters.