Bringing Customer, Project and Marketing Data Together with Aide CRM

Cambridgeshire ACRE's experience of moving to Aide CRM

Cambridgeshire ACRE has always recognised the importance of a strong Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. As a charity working across a wide range of projects, communities and stakeholders, we need reliable information to help us manage relationships, monitor activity, promote our services and evaluate our impact.

Before moving to Aide CRM in 2025, we used HubSpot. While HubSpot is a powerful platform, it is primarily designed as a sales tool. As a small charity, we found ourselves paying for many features that were not relevant to our work while still relying on a collection of separate systems for event management, marketing campaigns and surveys. Alongside these platforms sat numerous spreadsheets used to monitor project activity and outcomes.

We wanted a more streamlined approach that would reduce duplication, improve reporting and give staff a single place to manage their work.

Why we chose Aide

Aide has enabled us to bring many of these functions under one roof. One of the biggest advantages has been its flexibility. Rather than forcing us to adapt our processes to fit the software, Aide can be customised to reflect the way we work as an organisation.

This means the language staff see on screen mirrors the language we use when talking about projects, communities and customers. That may sound like a small detail, but it has made the system far more intuitive for staff and has encouraged consistent recording of information across the organisation.

Better monitoring and customer records

Monitoring and evaluation are critical for a charity that delivers multiple projects funded by different organisations. Aide has transformed the way we record activity.

We have created monitoring records that allow staff to log each interaction they have with a customer and link it directly to that individual's record. This gives us a complete history of our engagement with each customer while also enabling us to aggregate data at a project level.

As a result, we are better able to answer two importantquestions:

• What support has this individual received from us?
• What outcomes and outputs have been delivered through this project?

Previously, pulling together this information often required information from multiple systems and spreadsheets. Now it is available in one place.

Simplifying event management

Events form an important part of our work, whether we are delivering training, networking opportunities or community engagement activities.

Aide has significantly reduced the administrative burden of managing events. We can create online booking forms that allow customers to register directly, with the information flowing seamlessly into the CRM.

The platform automatically handles booking confirmations, joining instructions and event reminders, helping to ensure participants receive timely communications without creating additional work for staff.

What was once a time-consuming process has become straightforward and efficient.

Surveys and feedback made easy

Gathering information and feedback is essential for service improvement and reporting to funders. Aide's survey functionality has made this process much simpler.

Whether we are collecting information before a project begins, conducting consultation exercises or gathering post-event feedback,surveys can be created and distributed quickly. Responses are automatically linked to our wider customer and project records, making analysis and reporting much easier.

Effective marketing for a small charity

As a charity running multiple projects for different audiences, communicating with the right people at the right time is essential.

Aide provides us with the tools to create attractive marketing campaigns and distribute them to targeted mailing lists with minimal effort. Having customer data, mailing lists and campaign management within the same platform has reduced duplication and improved the consistency of our communications.

The ability to reach communities, members and stakeholders quickly and effectively is a significant benefit for an organisation of our size.

Outstanding support and continuous improvement

The technology itself is only part of the story. Our experience with the team at Pipe Media has been equally important.

Since adopting Aide, we have been impressed by their commitment to continuous improvement. Regular product updates introduce new functionality that genuinely helps us work more effectively. We look forward to the monthly releases and the opportunities to learn about new features through customer briefing sessions and demonstrations.

This commitment gives us confidence that the system will continue to evolve alongside the needs of organisations like ours.

The results

Moving to Aide has enabled Cambridgeshire ACRE to replace multiple systems with a single, integrated platform for customer management, monitoring, events, surveys and marketing.

The result has been:

• Reduced reliance on spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
• Improved monitoring and reporting capabilities. 
• More efficient event administration.
• Simpler survey creation and analysis.
• Better-targeted marketing communications.
• A system tailored to the way our organisation works.
• Significant cost savings compared with our previous CRM.

Put simply, Aide helps us run our charity more effectively.In fact, it costs around half as much as our previous system while providing the integrated functionality we were previously obtaining from several separate products.

We recommend Aide wholeheartedly. Indeed, we have been so impressed with the platform that we have already provided demonstrations to colleagues within our own network who are exploring alternatives for their organisations.