Gloucester Cathedral uses Harlequin CRM to unify data and underpin major fundraising campaign

In 2014, Gloucester Cathedral was embarking on Project Pilgrim. With a phase one target of £6 million, the Cathedral recognised that its ageing database needed replacing with a modern CRM system to coordinate campaign activity and consolidate information across the organisation.

What did you want to achieve and how far are you towards this?

The long term goal is for complete consolidation of information throughout the Cathedral. In the 16 months since go-live we are 50% there – it is an ongoing mission and Harlequin CRM is set to help us achieve this.

We also wanted a system to manage our fundraising effectively, giving us complete visibility of Project Pilgrim and the multiple sub-campaigns and events that fall under it. Harlequin CRM has certainly helped us to achieve our phase one target of £6M – where we needed to raise £1.5M to access £4.5M in matched funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

How do you use Harlequin CRM?

Campaign management: Project Pilgrim is set up as an umbrella campaign with a range of sub-campaigns underneath – for example our ‘Sponsor a Solar Panel’ campaign that has over 100 registrants. We also record all trust approaches as part of the campaign and manage our trust pipeline; this helps us to hit reporting targets and application deadlines. We also produce reports for a complete view of campaign performance.

Fundraising and communications: We record all donations on the system and have a complete log of the contact we have with our supporters.

Event management: The Events module was tremendously helpful for organising our Christmas Market. All stall holders were added and we would track when each had paid.

Volunteer management: Our 470+ volunteers play a vital part in Project Pilgrim and in Cathedral life in general. All their details are stored in the Volunteers module.

What are the key benefits of Harlequin CRM?

• The campaign tools helped us to achieve the phase one target for Project Pilgrim underpinning fundraising from trusts and foundations, major donors, individual giving and sponsorship.
• More centralised information and unified ways of working throughout key teams.
• Complete financial record of all donations and full log of communications.
• Information is more widely accessible rather than being in people’s heads!
• Much broader picture of donor relationships and engagement.
• Big reduction in the amount of hard data we store.
• Events module has streamlined our event management.
• Easy-to- use; the staff who have moved onto it, love it.
• The potential to do even more – the system helps to drive us forward.

How and why did you choose Harlequin?

Staff had experience of a range of CRM systems so we researched the market. We also called other cathedrals and Harlequin kept coming up top in relation to both the software itself and the aftercare service. We had a demo and liked it – and were reassured that the ongoing support would be reliable and responsive, which was a particular priority for us.

Read the full Gloucester Cathedral case study here.

38 total views, 38 views today

from UK Fundraising http://ift.tt/1Pf5R14