Anglican Youthworks pushes the boundaries with CRM

As a large, multi-faceted Christian organisation with an annual budget of $9.5 million, Anglican Youthworks Sydney (AYW) required a totally integrated solution, allowing financial management, reporting and intelligent fundraising and marketing features. Greentree had just the answer...

When evaluating the viability and eventual replacement of their five year old financial system, AYW found that while the existing system allowed good data entry and processing, it lacked flexibility and scalability.

For example, AYW did not have a full customer relationship management system to handle all their contacts and link to their financial information. They instead had three separate systems, one for financial management, a second for their bookings and another unconnected system for their fund raising activities.  It was clear that  the organisation had totally outgrown its incumbent system.

AYW carried out an initial review of four business software packages. Greentree was a competitively priced alternative with wide-ranging functionality and was chosen as it exceeded AYW’s specified criteria. Although there were a number of factors for the move to Greentree, pricing was critical. For AYW the solution needed to meet their investment level, but make no compromises in delivering the functionality to develop their activities. AYW accountant Fei Lim explains,

“As we are a not for profit organisation, we have to be diligent in making sure the money is well spent. We’re getting the best value from both the Greentree product and professional services offered by the Greentree Business Partner. We have had good account management from a number of consultants who have been supportive of what we want to achieve.”

Complete integration
AYW chose to implement the Contacts & Relationships, Sales & Marketing, Bookings Management, Fund Raising and Counter Sales Modules from Greentree’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite, and was impressed by the integration to Greentree Financials, which strongly influenced the decision to choose Greentree (Greentree’s CRM integrates with AYW Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, and General Ledger seamlessly and with absolutely no data duplication).

“Our goal was to have one fully integrated system,” says Fei. “When the evaluation process first began, we were impressed that a CRM package directly integrated to a financial management system could provide such functionality, and match our unique needs as a fundraising organisation.” 

Given the complexity of AYW organisation there were some obvious concerns about implementing a new system, namely networking and how the system would best fit their needs without too much customisation. A number of factors reassured ATW about Greentree, as some employees had heard of the heritage and success of Greentree’s CBA software and had seen the Greentree demonstrations. In addition, they received positive feedback from current Greentree users.

Fei says the training program worked well for its 20 users, both in terms of pricing and the participants resulting capability with Greentree. “The training was quite intensive and valuable with a high level of proficiency and support.”

Very, very, responsive
Greentree is making a direct impact on the success of AYW by freeing up resources that were previously tied down by labour intensive administration. They can now eliminate the following transactions: double handling of AP invoicing for head office and Outdoor Education and Conference centres and camp sites, import/export of New Zealand data, month end processing and monthly manual journals to General Ledger.

“Greentree’s Fixed Assets is a great time saving module,” says Fei, “as we previously manually processed fixed assets. It’s a definite improvement. Our resources can be used for more effective marketing and channelled into other areas of our work.”

Very, very, co-ordinated
Greentree’s CRM provides AYW with a powerful base allowing effective management of lists, invitations and bookings for their Outdoor Conference Centres, training courses and conferences, as well as tracking all sales and service processes and communications for their 25,000 customer, prospect and donor records. AYW is pushing the boundaries of CRM with have extremely complicated CRM, fund raising and booking requirements.

“Our experience in the field means we require a sophisticated product,” says Fei. Comprehensive and integrated coordination of events and resource bookings can be a major challenge for many organisations, so AYW rely heavily on Greentree’s Bookings Management system. “The integrated system we wanted has been achieved. Our management are able to see reports of the bookings, which are quite easy to do.” A future requirement is to be able to take bookings for their Outdoor Conference Centres via the internet.

“We hope to have an on-line conference booking facility in order to streamline our bookings processes and reduce the manual entry and duplication,” says Fei. With Greentree’s WebStore AYW now has a more automated system in order to remove such manual tasks. Their on-line book shop, eStore, enables them to target and generate sales from publication customers in Australia, New Zealand and overseas.

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/anglican_youthworks.cfm

Greentree
Graham Hill, Channel Manager
Email: graham.hill@greentree.com
Phone: 1800 000 737
Fax: 1800 090 487
Web: www.greentree.com

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