Guide Dogs NSW/ACT

Are you ready to THROW OUT your Financial Software?

In the ever competitive, not-for-profit space Guide Dogs has invested in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology to help strengthen its relationships with its donors and thereby increase its annual revenue, based entirely on public donations and bequests. A remarkable effort considering competing charities are finding it increasing difficult to survive as they strenuously battle for a diminishing donor dollar.

About Guide Dogs

Guide Dogs works to enhance the independence of people who are blind or vision impaired through the instruction and provision of free-of-charge, personalized professional orientation and mobility services such as guide dogs, long canes or other mobility aids.

As Guide Dogs completely relies on the financial generosity of individual donors, corporate sponsors and service clubs to survive, it is imperative that it continually delivers a high quality of ‘customer’ relationship management to build donor loyalty and increase retention.

Old system hampered progress

In the past Guide Dogs relied on an old DOS-based flat file database to house all its fundraising data.  However, it had reached a point where the system was failing to meet its needs as it was slow and clunky and reports had to be run overnight to extract the information required.

As such, the organization felt it was no longer able to act swiftly and smartly when it most needed to. The issue came to a head when the possibility of the database becoming corrupted became apparent, prompting Guide Dogs to take immediate action to protect the integrity and privacy of the existing data that had been captured and housed.

Pivotal CRM provides the solution

Assessing its data-management needs Guide Dogs realized it required a far more sophisticated technology platform – specifically a CRM solution that could consolidate all donor and prospective donor data and make it easily accessible for contact management, fundraising, appeals, donations processing, PR and bequest identification and management.  In search of such a solution Guide Dogs looked to the corporate world for insight and after seeing Pivotal CRM in action decided it was the ideal CRM solution for its business.

“Pivotal’s modular approach was of instant appeal”, said Jenny McCaffery, Fundraising Manager of Guide Dogs. “We wanted the flexibility to start out small and then scale up as need be and to be able to customize aspects of the technology, as we are not a typical corporate organization working with a typical sales cycle”.

“Importantly we wanted a solution that would fully consolidate our data and allow us to make powerful use of it. We needed to easily see the ‘big picture’. Pivotal has impressed us by rising to all these challenges to the point it has become the essential hub for our fundraising activities”.

Guide Dogs keeps all of its staff data (over 150 staff work for the Association), directors, donors and members in Pivotal. While improving its overall data management has been a key motivator for the investment in Pivotal, the Association also sought to improve its customer servicing, speed up its processing of donations and use the technology to better track and capitalize on corporate and partnership opportunities.

Pivotal allows a highly personalised approach

Given the sensitive nature of the relationship between the Association and donors it is critical the organization is not seen to unduly ’hassle’ people for donations. Using Pivotal the Association is now able to note the extent to which individuals wish to be contacted, in what manner, at what time of year etc. It can also flag people who do not wish to be contacted at all, but will still put forward donations on a regular basis. (It is not uncommon for donors to have a distant relationship with not-for-profit organizations – they are happy to donate but do not want to have a ‘relationship’ of sorts with the organization).

Each year Guide Dogs conducts six major marketing campaigns to raise its profile and secure donations and using Pivotal it has been able to fine-tune the approach, matching campaigns to appropriate and interested donors. Thanks to Pivotal’s automated marketing process, Guide Dogs can now more accurately and rapidly set up, conduct and realize results from campaigns. Most importantly, using Pivotal’s reporting tools it can measure the success of each campaign and feed this information into planning cycles to improve the effectiveness of future campaigns.

Accurate forecasting and reporting ensured

Being able to accurately report on the financial health of the organization at any point in time is critically important and using Pivotal’s analytical and reporting tools Guide Dogs can easily access its transactional history and assess its financial situation at any point in time. This helps fine-tune marketing communications appropriately to ensure budgeted funding levels are reached.

Equally important is the need to forecast, which is true for any organization or company working in a ‘sales’ environment. In Guide Dog’s case the situation is rather unusual as a great proportion of its funding comes from bequests and in the past these types of donations have not been marketing driven – more often than not they come as a ‘surprise’ to the organization. With Pivotal allowing access to far richer and accurate data, Guide Dogs has been able to improve its donor profiling and to identify donors who are most likely to ultimately bequest financial sums to the organization.

Also, by analysing past bequeathed trends and patterns Guide Dogs has improved the accuracy of its quarterly forecasting, allowing it to more precisely set and work towards financial targets. Importantly, as parties to an estate can challenge the bequest process, Guide Dogs needed to customize Pivotal to accommodate this unusual aspect of the ‘sales’ cycle.

“The beauty of Pivotal is that it has the flexibility to build modules or adapt existing ones to suit our individual requirements”, says McCaffery. “Working with Eclipse, our solution provider, we have been able to create a sales/donor module to provide the precise information we require in the form we require. The consultancy advice we have received, coupled with the ability of the technology is certainly delivering the results for us and that is fantastic”.

Calibre of the solution provider critical to success of a technology project

As McCaffery says it is important that organizations going down the CRM path build strong trusting relationships with their solution provider.  As so much is invested in the technology, organisations need to ensure their provider fully understands their business interests and goals and works in partnership to achieve the desired outcomes.

“The Eclipse people working with us have gone out of their way to understand our business. Not-for-profits are a whole different ballgame to corporates. By listening and questioning they have helped us refine our CRM strategy and to develop a solution that really does meet our needs yet we still feel total ownership of the process. This approach has made the project so much easier to work through, it has helped contain costs and means we place total trust in the advice we have received”, says McCaffery.

Limitless possibilities

Since implementing Pivotal, McCaffery has noted a change in the staff’s attitude and approach to work. All staff shares the responsibility of inputting accurate data into the database and regularly update files and information as they now fully understand and value the importance of singular up-to-date accurate data. At the same time they no longer hold duplicate records of data in their own computers which has been inefficient and meant data wasn’t shared amongst staff members. As staff have used the solution and seen the possibilities of how to match and compare data, all sorts of opportunities have been revealed.

As McCaffery jokes, such ‘revelation’ has been a two edged sword in reality, as with new ideas comes the need for even more change. The real challenge rests with finding ways and resources to prioritize and implement all the possibilities!

“Such a problem is actually a good one as it means we have a truly energetic and enquiring learning culture at work here. The bringing together of data and the ability to view it in different ways has really opened up our eyes to how our organization works, who we interact with and just what else we can do to achieve even greater results. We just need to prioritize the great ideas and get on with achieving them – and it’s all thanks to Pivotal we have this positive challenge”.

ROI realised using Pivotal:

• Have increased the value/number of donations by 10% in a very difficult year for charities – many competitor charities have failed to meet their budgets in this same year.
• Has reduced the time it takes to run queries from 24 hours to 5.6 seconds.
• Has increased the quality of the data captured enormously and allowed it to be accessed, queried and cross-queried in all manner of ways. Achieved a 30% increase in the queriable fields available.
• The full transparency of data and of business processes has led to improved quality and mining of data which, in turn, has resulted in more targeted and planned execution of marketing activity.
• Improved effectiveness of marketing efforts through efficient allocation and management of resources.
• Increased efficiency through the centralization of the databases and elimination of duplicate record keeping and data entry.
• 100% reduction in the time it takes to perform administrative activity such as cheque processing.
• 50% reduction in errors in accounting activity and significant reduction in hours spent checking work for accuracy (used to spend 5 hours per week – now do not need to as fully confident in the accuracy of the technology).