United Way Dynamics CRM Success Story

Non-Profit Organization Improves Constituent Relationship Management and Internal User Adoption with Dynamics CRM

Business Situation

United Way Calgary wanted to utilize Dynamics CRM 4.0 to manage relationships with constituents, report on constituent activities and donations and manage volunteer projects for both organizations and volunteers. Unfortunately, the implementation of Dynamics CRM done by another vendor did not meet expectations and fulfill required functionality resulting in the following challenges:

  • Low user adoption as the CRM data was not trusted
  • Existing reports were not designed properly, therefore, slowing down CRM
  • Ad hoc reports could not be built by the users due to inadequate training
  • Lack of edit functionality in CRM and poor CRM interface usability

Solution

United Way Calgary brought in Ideaca to repair the existing Dynamics CRM 4.0 implementation as well as integrate eight tables (2 way) with their legacy ERP software (Sage Rainbow). The specifications include:

  • Using Scribe and SQL to integrate the eight tables
  • Added enhancements to the existing implementation such as: SQL reports, creation of new entities and development of custom portrait tool
  • .Net programming and JavaScript were used to create data validation rules that match the ERP and keep the data consistent in both systems
  • Custom code was also used to help the business to create multiple opportunities based on the previous year’s donations
  • Other developments include a new email router to support multi-destination email messages, an entity record synchronization plug-in to copy fields between records, and jQuery auto complete to validate and improve the user experience when updating addresses

Benefits

  • Increase number of users and adoption rates with data consistency
  • Significant time savings due to better reporting functionality
  • Creation of opportunities was reduced by days from previous process
  • Simplified Graphical User Interface (GUI) reduced CRM user training time and increased usability
  • Enhanced constituent communications by enabling integrated letter and email merge of contact information
  • Complete view of constituent contact points (voice, home, business, mobile, fax, email, URL) in CRM