Hi Kevin S., you could totally start off with a POC in Salesforce so you can start capturing data.
What we did was created a flag in the Contact record in Salesforce that said "Advocate?" Public or Private.
Public = Public story
Private = Internal only or accepts reference calls
In a past life, before we moved over to Slapfive, we had also tried logging activities to get the "history" of an advocate. In another life, we also had a click list that we can select the type of activities they were interested in doing.
The hard part is the guardrails piece to it when it comes to building it internally, and can be a challenge if your marketing ops isn't fond of creating a ton of fields in Salesforce.
Buying a purpose-built solution will definitely have a lot more built out workflows and can help you with identifying net new advocates to your program.
I would recommend asking this question in the 🔒[private feed] channel so others can give you feedback on the tools other CMAs are considering 🙂
If you're not in the above private channel, you can ask Mary Green for access!
