Leveraging Customer Relationship Management to Advance Public Health

Introduction

The strategies and implementation steps outlined in this toolkit will help public health agencies strengthen their relationship management and communication through thoughtful planning and use of CRM tools. By clarifying internal goals, standardizing workflows, and selecting right-sized tools that fit agency capacity, agencies can intentionally improve systems for engagement.

Public health agencies often face duplicative outreach, limited visibility into partner interactions, and inconsistent follow up. These challenges are the result of systems that weren’t designed to support the complexity of modern public health work, highlighting the need for more intentional relationship management. As foundational capabilities, communications infrastructure and partnership development are both integral to public health infrastructure.

This toolkit frames CRM not as a technology purchase, but as a set of practices grounded in user-centered design, sustainability, and continuous improvement. It is intended for public health staff, managers, evaluators, and leaders who are exploring ways to improve outreach coordination, partner engagement, and internal communication. This toolkit can be used whether you are beginning to formalize a process or refining an existing system.

How to Use This Toolkit

This toolkit is designed to support public health agencies in strengthening relationship management and communication practices through intentional planning, tool selection, and continuous improvement. Relationship management practices define how an agency engages with partners over time and supports formal communications planning. The recommendations in this toolkit could also be applied at the program level instead of agency-wide.

Public health practitioners can use this toolkit to:

• Assess current relationship management practices by identifying gaps, inefficiencies, or duplicative outreach across programs and partners.
• Clarify goals and use cases for CRM tools and processes before selecting or modifying a system.
• Engage staff and partners in conversations about workflows, needs, roles, and expectations.
• Define meaningful evaluation measures and data fields that support monitoring, quality improvement, and equity-focused engagement.
• Guide CRM tool selection or reassessment, including consideration of cost, usability, sustainability, and data security.
• Strengthen existing systems using low- or no-code approaches when new technology procurement is not feasible.
• Support incremental improvement over time as priorities, staffing, or agency needs evolve.

Agencies may also choose to tailor the steps below based on size, staffing, and governance structure. In smaller or resource-limited settings, several steps may occur informally or concurrently. The recommendations provided here can also be used by individual staff or at the program level instead of agency wide.

Planning for CRM Success

Effective CRM implementation begins with intentional planning. Before selecting a tool or building new infrastructure, agencies should clarify their goals, understand current workflows, and involve the right people in the design process. The steps below are intended to help agencies identify practical, sustainable approaches that align with real-world public health operations. Cultivate a shared understanding of current outreach challenges, a short list of priorities for improvement, and clarity about which partners and interactions matter most to track.

Agencies may also benefit from applying the recommendations here beyond traditional partners by considering the community or customers of public-facing programs as a type of partner. Determining unmet customer needs could provide opportunities for improvements in communication, outreach, and follow up.

Step 1: Engage the Right Staff Early in the Process

Identify staff who will use, contribute to, or rely on CRM data, including program leads, outreach staff, evaluators, and data requestors. Create a framework for including these people in the design process from start to finish — early engagement helps ensure the system is practical, relevant, sustainable, and supported by staff.

• Avoid designing the system solely at the leadership or IT level.
• Convene short listening sessions or structured conversations to surface pain points and needs.
• Facilitate these listening sessions using structured questions and quality improvement tools that support reflection and root-cause exploration. In many sessions, the most valuable question is simply, “Why?”

In smaller agencies, this may involve informal conversations or a single cross-functional meeting rather than a formal workgroup.

Step 2: Define a Shared Vision for Partner Communication

Work collaboratively to define what effective partner communication looks like in practice. A shared vision helps guide decisions about outreach, coordination, data collection, and tool use. This also supports broader staff buy-in with any proposed changes to policies or procedures. Ask questions like:

• What experience do we want partners to have when interacting with our agency?
• What does strong coordination across programs look like?
• How do we balance proactive outreach with partner capacity and preferences?
• What concerns do staff have about changes to communication practices that we need to be considering how to mitigate through this process?
• What do strong partnerships look like in practice (e.g., responsiveness, shared decision-making)?

Define a small set of guiding principles (e.g., prioritize coordination, reduce duplication, ensure timely follow-up, share information transparently).

Step 3: Review Current Workflows and Data Practices

Assess how outreach, engagement, and follow-up currently occur across programs to understand what data is already being collected and where gaps exist.

• Talk with staff about workflows, informal tracking methods, challenges, and data that are collected but not yet shared.
• Conduct a brief communication review (e.g., the last quarter) to assess who was contacted, for what purpose, by whom, and how responsive those partners were. Review recent emails, notes, spreadsheets, or reports to identify patterns in communication and data collection. 
• Develop a partnership inventory from the results and identify the overlap.
• Map out a process or flowchart to identify opportunities for improvement or collaboration.

Capture effective practices and workflows that should be preserved or scaled, rather than starting from scratch.

• Identify program-level approaches that improved responsiveness, follow-up, or coordination.
• Consider how these practices could inform an organization-wide process or policy.

Agencies may pilot shared practices in a single program before expanding more broadly. Some practices you might find during such a review could include approaches such as:

• Conduct regular outreach reviews to identify partners who are over- or under-contacted.
• Hold regular cross-program meetings or joint trainings to coordinate outreach and follow up.
• Collect and use partner feedback to adjust communication practices.
• Use shared communication channels to streamline information sharing.

Step 4: Identify Opportunities to Strengthen Partner Experience and Reduce Burden

Consider how current practices affect external partners and stakeholders, particularly those who interact with multiple programs within the agency.

• Solicit partner feedback on communication preferences and pain points.
• Identify opportunities for coordination between agency programs or shared tracking to improve partner experience. Use shared tracking, contact management, or aligned outreach to reduce duplication and improve follow up.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen partnerships: 
  • Identify gaps in engagement or underrepresented partners.
  • Explore opportunities for deeper collaboration, like joint initiatives and shared planning.

If direct partner outreach is not feasible, staff can reflect internally on recurring issues or complaints or use customer service data.

Defining Evaluation Measures and Continuous Improvement Cycles

This section guides agencies in defining a small, practical set of evaluation goals, performance indicators, and priority reporting outputs, along with the core data fields needed to support them. By the end, agencies should have a clear plan for what to track and how data will be used.

Step 1: Identify Evaluation Goals and Priority Domains

Clearly defined evaluation measures and data fields ensure that CRM processes support meaningful decision-making, accountability, and continuous improvement. Evaluation goals should align with program objectives, engagement priorities, and organizational improvement and strategic planning.

Based on your conversations with agency programs and partners, identify which aspects of relationship management matter most, like:

• Community engagement and outreach: new partnerships, event attendance, follow-up rates.
• Partner relationship health: interaction frequency, partnership status, satisfaction.
• Case management and service delivery: volume, resolution time, follow-up time.
• Campaigns and events: reach, participation, pre/post-event survey results.
• Access: engagement across communities, organizations, or service providers.

Agencies may focus on one or two priority domains initially rather than tracking all areas at once.

Step 2. Define Evaluation Measures, Outputs, and Core Data Fields

Use insights from earlier planning activities to translate evaluation goals into specific indicators, reporting outputs, and the data fields required to support them. Aligning these elements ensures the CRM process captures only the information needed to support improvement and decision-making.

• Translate evaluation goals into practical indicators that can be produced using available staff time and tools.

  Example: If the evaluation goal is access, indicators might include:

  • Percentage of engaged organizations by organization type or sector over a defined time period.
  • Number of new organizations engaged per quarter.
  • Number of organizations engaged by community category (e.g., rural vs. urban-serving, organizations serving priority populations).

  Clarify how indicators will be used. For each indicator, define who reviews it, how often, how it will be used, and how it will be measured (data source, numerator, denominator, etc.) Agencies may use simple counts or trends and apply continuous improvement approaches such as Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles.

• Define priority outputs needed for decision-making, evaluation, or accountability (e.g., reports, dashboards, status summaries), based on gaps identified in current workflows.
• Assess required CRM functionality by determining which features are essential to produce the identified outputs and which are optional (e.g., contact storage and management, interaction logs, task or follow-up reminders, email integration, simple data entry or built-in forms, customizable fields or workflows, reporting and analytics, mobile access for field-based staff).
• Identify a core set of standardized data fields that directly support evaluation goals and reporting needs (e.g., organization name, contact person, role or title, contact information fields, assigned staff, date of last interaction, notes, status, and next follow-up date).
• Review existing tools to determine if current tools already meet or partially meet these needs.

Step 3: Evaluate the CRM Process Itself

Periodically assess whether the CRM approach is meeting its intended purpose and supporting staff effectively. Make adjustments as priorities, capacity, and partner needs evolve.

• Identify indicators of success, like reduced duplicative outreach, improved follow-up consistency, improved coordination, or increased staff confidence using the system.
• Establish feedback and communication mechanisms to surface issues and implement updates to fields, workflows, or reporting.
• Regularly review CRM data and gather feedback from staff and partners to assess usability, data quality, alignment with workflows, and whether the agency is meeting the vision it described for strong partner relationships.
• Solicit staff feedback on system usability and alignment with day-to-day workflows.
• Seek partner input when appropriate to identify communication challenges or opportunities to improve engagement.
• Use CRM data to inform improvements in service quality, coordination, and partner experience.

If needed, begin with informal feedback loops and integrate continuous improvement activities into existing meetings or evaluation processes rather than creating new structures.

Supporting Relationship Management with the Right Tools

Selecting the right CRM tool requires balancing functionality, usability, cost, and internal capacity. Based on your findings from the earlier sections, this section helps agencies assess whether a CRM tool — or an existing system — can support partner tracking, follow-up management, and priority reporting needs in a sustainable way. By the end of this section, agencies should have 1) clarity on which features are essential, 2) which trade-offs are acceptable, and 3) how cost, usability, capacity, and data security considerations affect long-term use, enabling confident tool selection that prioritizes practicality over complexity or feature breadth.

Step 1: Confirm Tool Fit Based on Defined Needs

Use the evaluation measures, reporting outputs, and core data fields identified in the previous section to assess whether potential CRM tools align with the agency’s goals and day-to-day operations.

• Confirm the tool supports priority use cases such as contact management, interaction tracking, follow-ups, and reporting that are necessary to produce defined outputs.
• Assess whether core functional requirements are met to support data collection and review.
• Avoid selecting tools based on feature breadth alone; prioritize functionality that directly supports evaluation, improvement, and coordination needs. 
• Consider acceptable trade-offs, recognizing that partial functionality may be sufficient if critical needs are met and workarounds are realistic.

Agencies with narrow or well-defined use cases may prioritize simplicity and ease of use over advanced functionality, or even accept partial functionality if critical needs are met and workarounds are feasible.

Step 2: Assess Usability, Security, and Governance

Ensure the tool is intuitive and supports appropriate access controls and workflows.

• Evaluate whether staff can easily enter, retrieve, and update information.
• Confirm support for role-based permissions (e.g., administrator, editor, viewer).
• Consider onboarding, training, and change management requirements.
• Determine how flexible the system is and whether changes can be made by either internal or external staff to change workflows or data collection fields if needed.

Smaller teams may rely on informal governance, while larger agencies may prefer formal policies.

Additionally, confirm that any selected tool meets applicable federal, state, and local data security requirements.

• Review data storage, access controls, and audit capabilities.
• Assess vendor reputation, update frequency, and long-term viability.
• Inquire about service level agreements with vendors (support response, issue resolution, etc.)

Agencies handling sensitive data may require additional security review or approvals.

Step 3: Review Cost, Capacity, and Sustainability

Consider both short-term and long-term resource implications.

• Review pricing models (per user vs. agency-wide) and identify potential hidden or ongoing costs to identify the total cost of ownership.
• Assess internal technical capacity for maintenance, customization, and troubleshooting.
• Consider staff time required for data entry and system upkeep. The data and the system will need to be maintained to continue to be useful.
• Assess functionality already available through enterprise software licenses; the answer may not be in purchasing a new tool.

Agencies with limited budgets may prioritize tools already available through existing software licenses. For agencies unable to procure new platforms, spreadsheet-based and low-code solutions can support effective CRM processes when designed intentionally. Examples include:

• Excel or Google Sheets for contact and interaction tracking using automated fields, data validation tools, and simple scripts (follow-up dates, last-contacted timestamps, dropdown menus to reduce errors during data entry). Use agency-approved AI tools to help with coding language, like Visual Basic in Excel.
• Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI interacting with SharePoint Lists to create basic relational databases. Use agency-approved AI tools to help with design and coding language.
• Online forms and lists (e.g., Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists) for standardized data entry.
• Shared interaction logs managed by designated staff or rotating roles.
• Basic reporting tools such as PivotTables, filters, and conditional formatting for analysis.
• Separate history or archive sheets to manage older records.
• Tagging systems to track partner types, equity-related indicators, or program areas.

It is reasonable to start with a simple structure and incrementally enhance functionality as needs evolve. Regardless of the tool, sustainability relies on consistent practices and shared expectations, such as:

• Standard process or policy for data entry, updates, use, retention, and recovery.
• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for maintaining CRM data. 
• Plan for ongoing training and onboarding, especially as staff roles change.
• Regular and transparent data use so the system remains meaningful and supports improvement and decision-making.
• Encourage peer learning opportunities or informal knowledge sharing across programs.

Document lessons learned to support future scaling or transitions. Smaller agencies may rely on informal documentation while larger agencies may require formal SOPs. Even simple, informal documentation can support succession planning that builds agency and partnership resiliency against staff turnover.

Related Webinars

• Designing for Connection
  by ASTHO: This webinar highlights innovative tools and strategies used by state public health leaders to improve partnership management, relationship evaluation, and customer-focused engagement with partners and local jurisdictions.
• Public Health Communications for Impact: Approaches to Strengthening Infrastructure
  by ASTHO: This webinar explores how public health agencies can strengthen their communications infrastructure to improve reach, effectiveness, and sustainability. It covers the Public Health Communications Collaborative's newly published Overcoming Challenges & Leveraging Strengths: Action Guide for Communicators at Public Health Agencies and includes a panel with three leaders from state and local health jurisdictions.