Watford Mencap

Fundraising

Watford Mencap is an independent self-financing charity that works with people with learning disabilities, their families and carers. The charity firmly believes that people with learning disabilities have the right to enjoy equal opportunities and be valued as a member of society, enabling them to life the life that they want for themselves.

 

The Challenge

Watford Mencap receives donations from multiple sources and this was recorded on an income sheet (paper based). Donor information was held and stored in files and folders, which made the retrieval of specific information on a donor difficult.

The challenge was to understand their key priorities and build a solution within a fixed budget that maximised the CRM benefits for the charity.

Project Aims

  • Introduce a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system which will empower them to record more accurately which individuals, groups and companies support the charity. This would also improve the charity’s relationships with supporters and help them monitor business activities more effectively
  • A grant was awarded to complete the project – hence the requirement to build a usable fundraising solution within the allocated budget of the project
  • Ensuring users understand how to use the system and ensuring administrators can maintain the system
  • Help tailor the business process to be suited for need, based on the Salesforce capability
  • Ability to create real time reports to produce useful insight

The Solution

Watford mencap chose to use Salesforce and the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) to capture their fundraising information.

This was configured to suit the requirements for the recording of Donor organisation details and log donations, Event Tickets, Sponsorships for events, Grants from individuals, corporates and Trusts/Foundations.

Many NPSP functionalities such as Grants for payments and deliverables, Matching Gift, Engagement Plans, Relationship, and Affiliations were used to deliver the requirements.

Key reports were built to meet day-to-day business needs.

Business process changes were proposed for:

  • working with volunteers who support the charity
  • working with the finance team
  • working with other data sources such as charity log
  • working with the runners’ database
  • logging gift aid against donations
  • capturing consent from other data sources
  • internal event management
  • external event place management

Different types of training such as user training, report building training and administrator training were conducted to make the charity self-sufficient after project completion.