July was selection month. As our application numbers continue to climb, so does the effort to whittle those down to 5-7 great companies with great founding teams. As of today, we have made 6 offers and hope to announce them to you on August 26th – day 1 of the Fall 2013 program.
As we move through this, I find myself wondering how I can make this go easier. So, I am also working on improving our back office at TSF. I love tools but get easily frustrated by features and product decisions that overly complicate things. These are a few of the tools we use:
- Google Apps for email
- Insightly for a group contact manager
- iContact for mass emails
- WordPress for our Website
- Wufoo Forms for gathering application information
- Excel to move the applications around to our team for individual voting & comments
A few of us have lamented a lack of a light CRM for 2-3 person teams. Over the past few weeks I have reviewed Salesforce.com, Mailchimp, Highrise, Zoho, and many others.
As part of this, I changed this blog feed to email from Feedburner to Mailchimp.
Anyone want to comment in favor or not of various tools?
We’ve found the combination of FormAssembly and salesforce.com to be very effective in helping us intake, review, award, manage and track applicants and winners of the NC IDEA grant program.