Customer Story: Fawcett Society

Valerie Derrett, Database and Support Services Officer at Fawcett Society, has worked with databases for the last 25 years – developing; designing and building bespoke systems for companies as varied as leading IT suppliers, Letting Agencies and a national Caring Organisation.

Before she joined the charity in September 2021, they never had a data focused expert on the team so the data was mixed which reduced the quality of reporting, and the ability to manage digital campaigns, create mailing lists and log donors communications.

Valerie started cleansing the charity’s data and quickly became a massive fan of the Charity CRM.

‘The Access Charity CRM is really good! I love the Collaboration tool, we use it for Memberships and for Income. Now that the quality of the data is really good, we use it for contacts, we use it to log our communications, we use it to put people into groups when we want to do mailings, logging interest etc.’

‘We contact a lot of other women sector organisations so having their data up to date and in one place has saved us so much time Whenever we want to send out a campaign in mail and get all the women sector organisations involved, we have a group, we just ping the email out to that group so that is a big, big time saver! That is a massive advantage!’

Because they are only a team of eight and everyone is really busy but also most of her colleagues have public-facing roles, one thing that Valerie struggled with was getting the whole team to use the system on a daily basis. But as soon as everyone started to understand and notice the benefits of using the system consistently and also how intuitive and easy to use it is they started using it more and more.

‘Now that the team are using it more and in the right way, it is so much easier to look up a contact in a particular organisation and all the emails are logged. When a new person starts it’s so much easier to look back through all the logged contacts and that is very beneficial for us because it keeps our organisation’s history in one place.’

The charity decided to add the Premier Success Plan option which has helped them in numerous ways to maximise the efficiency of their use of Charity CRM and thereby saving a huge amount of working time.

‘The Premier Success plan has been the key to the success of my and the whole organisations use of the CRM. Our most recent Premier Success Plan meeting resulted in help with our Gift Aid processing and after a 10 minute conversation we were able to claim a missed payment of over £5000 and we also know how to maximise claims in the future.’

‘The Charity CRM makes it easy because we can claim it automatically through the system. You submit the claim online through the CRM, it posts an automatic response into the CRM to show that you’ve submitted it online and then you just check your bank account about 10 days later and the money is there!’

‘Having the customer success plan is brilliant, the team is so good, they just solve problems! Because we have this plan it just makes it instant getting an answer. For anyone who is just starting to use the Access Charity CRM that doesn’t have the Premier Success Plan, I think they’d be mad. I think they need it because it also enables you to ask the ‘how do I do that?’ question which is a massive selling point, in my opinion.’

Being able to create her own reports in the Charity CRM was a massive selling point for Valerie

From all the systems that I have worked with, they usually come with a set number of reports and if you want anything else you have to pay. But one of the best things about the Charity CRM is that I can write my own reports and I think that’s a massive selling point because you always need more reports than you are sold.’

The system has enabled Valerie to easily manage their membership renewals: ‘Through a quick search I can see who is about to expire, and go through the appropriate steps to make sure that they do renew their membership.