The Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), focused on conserving threatened species and ecosystems in southern Africa, uses the customer relationship management (CRM) solution, GoldMine, from FrontRange Solutions to stay in constant, relevant contact with its more than 5 000 members.
A non-profit, non-governmental environmental agency, the EWT proactively manages 110 projects through 18 field working groups.
Projects include helping airports keep the birds on their properties from becoming hazards to aeroplanes taking off and landing, conserving the environments across 11 African countries that support migratory birds like Blue Swallows and Cranes, conserving bats, Giant Bullfrogs and carnivores, building environmental awareness and conservation capacity in disadvantaged and other communities, and developing the research and expertise needed to ensure that environmental laws and policies are relevant and effective.
The EWT is funded entirely through individual and corporate memberships and donations, often through bequests from members.
"It`s vital, therefore, that we maintain member loyalty and interest in our projects by providing them with constant feedback about our projects, inviting them to our monthly talks around the country, and maintaining their subscriptions to our various journals and other publications," says EWT fundraising manager, Samantha Brown.
"As part of the relationship nurturing process, we try to provide a highly personalised contact - by, for instance, remembering birthdays, rejoicing with members in the birth of their children, and wishing people well when they`re ill.
"Also, we often need to engage our members directly in our projects. An example would be providing camping equipment to underprivileged communities that have agreed to get involved in our field research, or tracking and monitoring species like African Wattled Crane or Wild Dogs. We would call on our members to donate, say, sleeping bags, rain jackets, gas bottles or torches.
"In other words, we have to manage a dynamic mix of regular, scheduled contacts and ad hoc, project-related contacts - across a range of different databases, because members join us at varying membership fees and are interested in different projects or publications.
"GoldMine helps us manage that complexity easily and efficiently."
GoldMine`s flexibility and affordability were key issues in the EWT`s original choice of the solution.
"We are proud of the fact that 90% of member funds go straight to projects," Brown says. "But to achieve that we have to keep our internal administrative costs as low as possible. Specifically, we didn`t want a CRM solution that would need a lot of external and therefore costly support.
"GoldMine is both easy to use and to adjust - and so we can operate very efficiently with a couple of our own people trained as super users.
"Also, GoldMine is a very stable system, so we don`t have to spend much time or effort on maintenance and management.
"In addition, it`s been around a long time and FrontRange Solutions has a long-term approach to its market. So in the event of our absolutely having to call on external support, we have the confidence of knowing it`ll be there when we need it."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, points out that the advanced customer relationship and service management functionality of FrontRange`s products owes no small debt to the concepts of conservation. "We talk about an ecosystem of FrontRange products because, as in environmental conservation and social health, there are no boundaries between actions taken at one point in a community served by IT and the effects of that action felt at another.
"To work properly, everything needs to be connected at both an intuitive and practical level - and operate from an integrated perspective. That`s why GoldMine, like all our other products, was designed from the point of view of process rather than functionality. When you get the processes right, functionality follows automatically."
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