Despite maintaining some 25,000 customer, prospect and donor records, Anglican Youthworks Sydney (AYW) did not have a full customer relationship management (CRM) system to handle its contacts and link to their financial information. Instead the organisation was using three separate systems, one for financial management, a second for bookings and another unconnected system for fund raising activities.

While the existing financial system provided good data entry and processing capabilities, AYW found it lacked flexibility and scalability and the organisation had totally outgrown the incumbent system within five years.

AYW carried out an initial review of four business software packages with a view to replacing it. Greentree (who were recently recognised as one of 25 global rising stars by MIS magazine) was the successful candidate as it was a competitively priced alternative with wide-ranging functionality which exceeded AYW’s specified criteria.

AYW accountant Lim Lim says pricing was critical, but the organisation was not willing to make any compromises in delivering the functionality necessary to develop its activities.

"As we are a not for profit organisation, we have to be diligent in making sure the money is well spent. We are getting the best value from both the Greentree product and professional services offered by the Greentree Business Partner."

Lim says she received helpful advice from a number of consultants who were supportive of what the organisation wanted to achieve.

"Overall, AYW felt Greentree was the most cost-effective solution available for mid-market organisations that encompassed the customer relationship management module."

An integrated solution
AYW chose to implement the Contacts & Relationships, Sales & Marketing, Bookings Management, Fund Raising and Counter Sales Modules from Greentree’s CRM suite, and was impressed by the integration to Greentree Financials, which strongly influenced the decision to choose Greentree.

"Our goal was to have one fully integrated system," says Lim. "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." Greentree’s CRM integrates with its Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, and General Ledger seamless and with absolutely no data duplication.

According to Lim, there were some obvious concerns about implementing a new system.

"The issues that concerned us were the networking and how the system would best fit our needs without too much customisation, given the complexity of our organisation."

But a number of factors reassured AYW about Greentree.

"Some of us had heard of the heritage and success of Greentree’s CBA software and we had seen the Greentree demonstrations performed by capable and professional consultants. In addition, we received positive feedback from current Greentree users. With this in mind, we believed Greentree would deliver a solution to build on."

Lim says the training programme worked well for the 20 users, in terms of both pricing and the participants resulting capability with Greentree.

"The training was quite intensive and valuable. We commend the staff at the Greentree Business Partner for their high level of proficiency and support."

Freeing up resources
Lim says Greentree is making a direct impact on the success of AYW by freeing up resources that were previously tied down by labour intensive administration.

"We 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. We also have improved reporting.

"Greentree’s Fixed Assets is a great time saving module 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."

John Cross, director of Business & Finance, says the change to Greentree has achieved AYW’s integration objective and streamlined processes.

"It’s excellent to have an integrated system organisation-wide. We’ve seen many improvements in the financial system. Certainly the interface with Excel has been good to have and the month by month accounting has been improved overall. The visibility of the financial status is much better for the management team, who have been able to get more from the system."

Co-ordination made easy
Greentree’s CRM provides AYW with a powerful base allowing effective management of lists, invitations and bookings for its Outdoor Conference Centres, training courses and conferences, as well as tracking all sales and service processes and communications for the organisation’s 25,000 customer, prospect and donor records.

"We are pushing the boundaries of CRM," says Cross. "We have extremely complicated CRM, fund raining and booking requirements. Our experience in the field means we require a sophisticated product."

Comprehensive and integrated coordination of events and resource bookings can be a major challenge for many organisations, so AYW relies heavily on Greentree’s Bookings Management system, as Lim explains.

"The integrated system we wanted has been achieved. Our management are able to see reports of the bookings, which are quite easy to do. We just have to work through the nitty gritty of the system now to fine tune it to our specific needs."

A future requirement for AYW 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 Lim.

With Greentree’s WebStore AYW now has a more automated system in order to remove such manual tasks. The organisation’s on-line book shop, eStore, enables it to target and generate sales from publication customers in Australia, New Zealand and overseas.

Effective campaigns
Greentree’s Sales & Marketing module provides a range of tools for full sales cycle and campaign management enabling each division to send multiple, highly targeted mailings regarding publications, training, camps and conferences monthly.

"We use this module quite a lot - it’s a good system," says Lim. "We did not have this functionality before, so mailings in the past were managed by combining databases which meant we always had many duplicates to deal with. With Greentree all our contacts are in one system so we’ve eliminated duplicates, saved on postage due to reduced errors and have a better delivery process. The result is a more efficient and cost-saving system and an overall improvement to customer service. We are on the right track."

AYW is a major Christian publisher, and its Sunday School and Scripture curriculum is used both in Australia and overseas. The organisation’s publications are sold by wholesalers either by mail-order or through its shop in Sydney, where cash sales are handled with Greentree’s Counter Sales. All new sales are immediately reconciled providing clear audit trails on all cash sales, and the team can see the total sales and produce reports on this data.

"The functionality we have is ideal for our volume of customers and book sales," says Lim. "Our management are able to see accurate inventory and sales information."

Reflecting on the past two years with Greentree, Cross says AYW is happy overall and has seen improvements from achieving its goal of an integrated CRM and financial system.

"It’s been a positive move. We will keep building on our progress in specific CRM modules."

For more information

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