LIFE, a growing Auckland-based Christian church, shows that customer relationship management systems are just as useful for nonprofit organisations as commercial ones as it moves its membership database to Microsoft Dynamics CRM...
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In the space of less than 20 years, LIFE has grown from nothing to a congregation of several thousand who attend services at six centres in the Auckland region.
Paul and Maree de Jong, who came to Auckland from the Christian Life Centre in Sydney, started the church in 1991. Its first service took place at Auckland Teachers’ College in Epsom and was attended by just 21 people.
"The old system was very much one-way traffic – we could enter data, but didn’t get much back out of it. Now, we have a system that can automate our processes and allow us to get the necessary information out to run our organisation."
Clayton Smith
IT co-ordinator
Today the church is based only a few kilometres from where the original service was held, on Mt Eden Road, and it now has a congregation of more than 7500.
With so many members — and counting — keeping the congregation’s records in order was becoming more than LIFE’s Microsoft Access-based system could manage.
“We had run into a number of issues with data corruption and system crashes,” says Clayton Smith, who looks after LIFE’s IT systems. “Whenever we had a large number of users on it just froze. So, the product was starting to fail on us.”
Apart from capacity issues, the system also made hard work of some routine functions. Church members, besides attending services, typically get involved in activities such as helping out in the community and participating in singing and other groups.
Increasingly, co-ordinating such activities relies on email, a function the Access-based system was not particularly nimble at. Smith would export contact details from the database, then have to validate email addresses, because of the haphazard way in which records had been kept.
“People could enter data in pretty much any field, so before sending out emails I would have to run the exported addresses through an Excel validator tool, eliminate the false and duplicate ones, before copying and pasting them into Outlook.”
Having done it countless times, Smith had become pretty quick at the process. But it still added about 10 minutes to the job of sending out emails.
Another important role for the system was tracking finances, not a trivial task given LIFE’s membership and the audit requirements charities such as churches need to comply with.
“With 5,500 to 6,000 people coming through our doors each week, and many people giving, it’s a significant amount of money,” Smith says. “We have to be careful how we manage it.”
Access was adequate up to a point, but with an expanding membership, little control over the quality of data entered into the system and the growing use of electronic payment methods for member contributions, Smith was conscious that more efficient systems existed – and one was needed.
He began shopping around for a replacement.
“We looked at quite a number of database management systems, but the cost wasn’t going to work for us.”
Through a church connection, he made contact with Auckland consultancy Magnetism, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The product’s flexibility, and Microsoft’s pricing for charities of about 25 per cent of normal retail, made it a compelling option.
Megan Walsh, a project manager at Magnetism says a customer relationship management system might seem inappropriate for a not-for-profit organisation — one with members rather than customers.
But what Magnetism did was “strip out the business lingo” and build an application on the remaining framework that is specific to a non-profit organisation. Using Dynamics’ ‘extended’ or xCRM capability, Magnetism turned the software into a membership management system for LIFE.
Magnetism also managed to do this at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives available. LIFE’s Clayton Smith says the church now has a system that is much more than the mere data repository that Access was. In just the first phase of its implementation, it has reduced the time and effort needed to send out emails to congregation members, which now involves just a few clicks. It is enabling other administrative functions to be streamlined too.
“The old system was very much one-way traffic – we could enter data, but didn’t get much back out of it. Now we have a system that can automate our processes and allow us to get the necessary information out to run our organisation.”
The system will be used by over 60 fulltime staff and 30 interns who care for the people at LIFE and run the many community projects. Smith says one of the objectives of the new system was to be able to automate task management as staff worked with members on various church activities.
“We wanted to be able to keep staff and volunteers accountable for the tasks they were supposed to be doing and to be able to automate that via email or through links between CRM and task lists in Outlook.”
Dynamics CRM automatically keeps tabs on whether tasks are done and follows up with reminders.
Another key advantage of the CRM over the Accessbased system is that it is web-based, so users can log-in over LIFE’s network or the internet without needing a local copy of the software. In the future, portal access could be extended to church members as well.
Magnetism’s Megan Walsh says LIFE’s use of Dynamics CRM demonstrates the suitability of the system to organisations outside the commercial world. At LIFE, she says, the software brings a level of system sophistication well beyond the application it replaces.
“For example, we’re developing an interface between the system and Apple’s iPad that will be used to record the dropping off and picking up of children at church events.”
The application will match children with care-givers, printing a label that connects a child with the person authorised to collect him or her.
Walsh says organisations of all kinds — from gyms to clubs to professional bodies — can benefit from being able to collect and mine detailed member information.
It’s early days for LIFE. Smith says so far they’ve been content with having the new system replace the functions of the old one. In future, it will be put to work managing more of the church’s activities, such as events.
To be able to tap into the congregation’s expertise for future development of the system, he might want to mine the membership database for people with appropriate software skills.
“We have quite a few .Net and ASP developers in the congregation. I’ll put a team of people together and let them know what we’re doing with CRM, to see if any of them want to help us out with a one-off project, or I’ll approach them.”
With Dynamics CRM, he has the perfect tool both for locating such people and a tool that can go to work on the church’s behalf.