The Company
Children’s Heart Surgery Fund’s (CHSF) mission is to support the Leeds Congenital Heart Unit in becoming a world class centre of excellence – by providing the funding and resources needed to care for a patient’s heart, mind, family and future.
CHSF was founded in 1988. Since then, they have awarded around £7 million in grants to the Leeds Congenital Heart Unit, its patients and their families, as well as funding important research proposals.
The Opportunity
Like many charities, CHSF’s needs have grown increasingly complex since they were founded in 1988.
Their systems have grown organically and were beginning to impede the charity’s performance.
- They had an off-the-shelf charity CRM system which wasn’t well used within the organisation. Employees had started to run their own spreadsheets for their day to day tasks.
- Donations were manually transferred from their website to the CRM system.
- The existing system was difficult to customise for their needs and had big functionality limitations. They felt this was holding back their growth and effecting customer service.
- They wanted to begin to analyse data more intensively, to help with their marketing. Again, their current system didn’t have this capability.
We were aware that CHSF had previous suppliers and systems which didn’t meet their expectations. We were confident that our approach would work for CHSF and that by including staff in the build process we’d give CHSF the system they needed.
The Solution
The system needed to:
- Eradicate data duplication
- Be powerful, yet easy to use
- Allow speedy, accurate reporting
- Save users’ time
- Be GDPR compliant
We tailored Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM to work for CHSF, which included
- Integration with JustGiving, so donations automatically get created in the system
- Integration with a payment merchant to take direct debit payments
- Recording event sign-ups, donations and mailing list subscriptions from the website in the system
- Integrating MailChimp email newsletters with CRM. This meant that activity could be recorded against each potential donor and communications could be much better targeted
- Linking to the accounts package Xero, so all transactions in CRM appear in Xero
- Tracking all relevant correspondence from Outlook in the CRM so users will have vital background info on each potential donor
- Using Microsoft Power BI to create live reports and dashboards, so users can accurately track donations, campaigns and KPIs
- Marketing – adding all activity in to CRM campaigns, so that effectiveness can be tracked
Hear from the customer
All My Systems were different from other suppliers – they came and listened to what our needs were, then went away and responded with a brilliant demonstration.
I was tempted with an off-the-shelf system, but because of the demonstration and how they understood our organisation’s needs, we choose AMS.
It was clear that they fitted well with our values, which for us was crucial. The AMS team worked hard to imbed themselves into our organisation, to fully understand our needs at every stage.
Sharon Milner
Chief Executive of Children’s Heart Surgery Fund
