Greentree helps UK charity flush away poverty with ‘potties’ for Africa

The conflict charity was fighting a spreadsheet war when Greentree came to the rescue. A bonus has been better marketing information, helping CORD’s imaginative ‘Toilet Twinning’ campaign take off. This aims to provide poor African families with life’s basics – including a toilet...

It began as a potty idea, but CORD’s global ‘Toilet Twinning’ Campaign has captured imaginations the world over. From schools in the South Pacific to councils in the Scottish Highlands; to football clubs, dentists, firemen and accountants, and even the Bishop of Coventry, all have twinned their loos with latrines deep in the Burundi Bush.

The campaign really took off as a result of CORD implementing Greentree. Before this, the charity struggled with being able to access timely information about donors.

But Greentree provided this, enabling much better targeting of CORD’s marketing efforts.

The result is the UK charity is now heading for its 1,000th twinning, which sees donors proudly display their CORD ‘toilet twinning’ certificates in their smallest room, helping provide basic sanitation for people rebuilding their lives in the war-torn country after 14 years exile.

Excel not enough
CORD is in the business of building peace in some of the world’s most hostile places, but that didn’t stop its accounts being a mess when Kerry Bosworth took over as finance director, at the charity’s UK headquarters. At the time, its various country offices were being run on Excel spreadsheets alone.

Not surprisingly, it was struggling to manage its £3 million of funding using just spreadsheets. This had effectively created a hostile environment of an electronic kind, says Bosworth.

“Auditing of our finances had raised a few eyebrows, since changes and deletions could easily be made to ‘live’ open spreadsheets.”

Bosworth says it’s imperative CORD meet its compliance obligations under UK law (Charities Standard Recommended Practice). And, if it can’t satisfactorily report to donors about the fate of their contributions, funding can dry up.

To deal with this, management made a “no-brainer” decision to implement Greentree, says Bosworth. Its Excel integration and reporting mean it can make sense of CORD’s spreadsheets and meet the charity’s reporting requirements.

Consolidation from days to hours
Each month, the charity’s various country offices send CORD UK an Income & Expense spreadsheet, in foreign currency.

All these figures, which are in a number of currencies, then have to be converted into UK pounds and put into a single CORD spreadsheet. This was such a “timeconsuming logistical nightmare” that consolidation of all the figures only happened annually. And Bosworth’s certain that the manual nature of the process was making CORD vulnerable to errors and omissions too.

But all this has changed with Greentree.

“The Excel link and foreign currency module we’ve installed mean each country office can continue sending us its spreadsheet. But, instead of having to manually convert and extract the figures, we now automatically import these.

“This now takes just a few hours each month, whereas it used to take days and wouldn’t be accurate,” says Bosworth.

“We can now produce a fully consolidated set of figures in just a few days, instead of annually. Greentree is now our definitive, accurate and up-to-the-minute database of all our transactions.”

The suite was also implemented with little disruption to the way the various country offices handle their accounts.

Potty idea takes off
Greentree has also has enabled CORD to get more consistent and usable information out of its Microsoft Access supporter database. This has impacted positively on our fund-raising efforts, says Bosworth.

“Donors are our lifeblood and Greentree has enabled us to glean valuable insights into the frequency and amount of donations so we can use this information to improve the success rate of our campaigns.”

“The ‘Toilet Twinning’ campaign, which has raised £60,000 to build 1,000 toilets in Burundi, was a successful example here. It has provided the marketing team with timely information about donations, resulting in better targeting of CORD’s marketing effort.

Audit three months early
CORD gets funding from several different sources, from both individual and organisational donors. Many donors require information to be presented in a specified report format. This presented CORD with another administrative challenge, involving lots of time and manipulation of spreadsheets and cashbooks, so the figures could be presented in customised reports.

“The really fantastic thing about Greentree’s reporting is that we can automatically import all the foreign currency information and display it alongside the converted UK figures,” says Bosworth.

“There’s no need to cut and paste the figures from country office spreadsheets any more. Each report is tailored exactly to each donor’s needs and circulated within a month, not the two months it used to take.”

With faster and more efficient consolidation of its finances, CORD now completes its annual audits three months earlier than was possible previously.

Transaction tree = easy audit
Another invaluable aspect of Greentree is the ability to drill down through various levels of data, says Bosworth.

“We use transaction tree analysis to isolate specific types of expenses or income. This makes it easy when auditors want to analyse different data categories, since we’ve got the information at our fingertips.”

Bosworth is in no doubt that CORD couldn’t function as it does today without Greentree. Its ability to significantly speed up and improve data access allows much greater visibility and control of income and expenses against budget, she says.

With this information at her fingertips, Bosworth can manage cash flows more efficiently; while customised reporting enables her to comply with UK compliance standards. CORD is now confident that it’s well placed to retain and attract the vital funding that will allow it to continue its work in some of the world’s most unstable regions.





> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 0800 313 313
F: 09 366 3889
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com








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