Customer Story: St Petrocs

The challenge

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, St Petrocs saw a huge increase in demand for its frontline services as many other support services closed. At the same time, staff at the charity had to adapt to many staff working from home while keeping frontline services running.

Unfortunately, St Petrocs’ limited website and heavy use of spreadsheets made launching and managing digital campaigns a frustrating process at a critical time for the charity.

One of the charity's biggest struggles was the fact that they were using a third-party donation platform for online fundraising, and it couldn’t integrate with their previous Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. As well as being confusing to the user and taking people away from their website, it also meant that their reporting suffered. All of the donor information logged by that system was being lost.

The solution

Jessica Rush, Associate Director of Fundraising at St Petrocs explains 'We’d been using the Access Charity CRM for a couple of years and soon discovered it had the integrations we were looking for with Access Charity Websites, which we also decided to purchase. This meant that we could take back some of the control we were missing, and start to implement a new digital presence that was both user-facing and with back-office functions. We went live with our new website in November 2021.'

Results

Since using Access Charity CRM, St Petrocs has seen a significant shift towards building stonger supporter relationships. 

'One of the biggest benefits of our new CRM is being able to have all of our information in one place. Simple things like knowing each donor’s name - and having access to their profile from one central system - may sound small, but they’re fundamental in building meaningful relationships.

Each donor creates a unique online profile, so we can easily see who is giving multiple donations or when and where they are giving. We can be confident that it is genuinely that person, rather than someone who happens to have the same name.

Physical donations are essential for many charities and they play a big part of our service delivery. Even though they’re offline campaigns we’re able to manage them just like our digital fundraising activity. By logging ‘gifts in kind’ onto people’s donor profiles, our ability to spot trends for giving is increased as we get a full picture of people’s habits. We’re able to update our website to communicate the types of items we’re accepting in real-time. This part was really useful during the Covid-19 pandemic and numerous lockdowns.'

Talking about the Fundraising Hub within Access Charity CRM, Jessica said 'Fundraising Hub is very user friendly, very clear and accessible. We’ve had a massive uptake in our team using it and the supporter care team sit with it open all the time. As soon as the phone rings, they search the person they’re talking to - it has been a game changer for us.'

Also, since using the Access Charity Websites solution, St Petrocs has seen a 30% uplift in the number of people signing up to regular donations. 'With a new website that was easier to use, packed with messaging that resonated and had clear, connected workflows, we saw a 30% uplift in the number of people signing up to regular donations since going live. Adding to that, the number of people choosing to give more than £10 a month increased by 30%.'