"Thanks to AideCRM we can easily see an overarching picture of our development work."

What was the issue you wished to solve?

We were looking to replace an old database that did not work for us and at the same time bring all our contact details from both Mailchimp© and Eventbrite© into a single system that enabled us to see with more clarity what we were doing across different strands of our work.

How did AideCRM solve it?

It solved it by allowing us to do what we needed. Importantly it enabled us to have a system that tracked contacts and organisations and the work we do with them in a system that was customisable and easy for the team to pick up. We also benefited from the support and training that the PipeMedia team offer and this has been really useful as has the fact that we can get support from a named person who understands what we do.

How long did it take to solve, once installed?

We started to feel the benefits of the recording of the work we do and how we could report this almost immediately.

We made a conscious decision to not try and do everything at once so took a phased approach to moving all our email newsletters and the corresponding address lists across so that we were confident in the data and staff were confident on using the system. We also phased our use of the events section to coincide with the development of our new website and we now use this facility to book all of our trainings and events.

We are also in the process of merging with another charity and have started to look at combining their systems into AideCRM.

The upshot of this is that our issues are still not fully solved, but this is because we continue to look at what functionality we can use, we look at what new functions we want and make suggestions, and we are now trying to plug in a new organisations systems as staff and trustees agreed that AideCRM is the best system and that the new organisation would move forward with this.

We are able to now look at reporting on what we do in a far more nuanced way, we are able to report on work under different funding pots as well as our overall delivery and this has been useful for us internally as well as completing funding reports.

Do you have any supporting data points you would like to mention?

Thanks to AideCRM we can easily see an overarching picture of our development work. Also understanding what groups are coming to us for support, as we categorise monitoring reports. Using AideCRM for our events and mailings has simplified our work, using only one system has saved time for the team and helped simplify our booking process for groups.