Crosscare are a charity based in Dublin offering a variety of services such as; homeless services, youth services, information and advocacy services, and community and food services. Tens of thousands of people have been helped by Crosscare since they were founded in 1941. Crosscare currently employ over 500 staff with over 1,500 volunteers in locations throughout the greater Dublin area and Wicklow.
Crosscare have been a customer of the commercial version of SugarCRM since 2015. We will focus on how SugarCRM has helped with the Volunteer Management aspect of the organisation.
We needed a system where we could manage everything from advertising, volunteer applications, through to the vetting process, selection, training qualification tracking and reporting on numbers of active volunteers in each service that Crosscare provide. SugarCRM was already in place for one specific volunteer programme that Crosscare has but we needed to have the flexibility in the system to design a solution for our needs to manage the Volunteer Services as a whole.
Due to the nature of our work, we needed to be able to provide access to certain data points whilst keeping the rest secured for only certain members to have visibility. Sugar was able to provide a solution that could work for us and have the flexibility to adapt with us as our needs changed over time. We also needed to make sure that every Euro we spent was invested in a solution that would bring us a direct benefit because as a charitable organisation, we must make financially responsible decisions.
The results have been great. We are able to keep a full view for the managerial staff whilst granting access to certain data to our access users and knowing that the data of the people we service is secure. The software is easy to use and with a small amount of training, we’ve been able to adjust displays and layouts to meet our requirements. What we love is the fluidity of the system, the more we use Sugar the more comfortable we were with the system and were able to adapt it as we gained efficiencies and changed our processes.
We’ve been able to steadily add more and more functionality into Sugar so that more of our internal processes can be conducted through the same software and we were able to move away from a reliance on spreadsheets. Our recent adaption was adding a new Web-to-Lead form that allows people to apply to be volunteers with us straight through our website and this pulls straight into Sugar. This has vastly shortened our application process and the amount of manual data import that had previously been required.
We work closely with our Account Manager, Annie, who has been a really fantastic resource. Annie acts as our point of contact at Provident CRM and she has provided solutions to our problems, responds promptly and efficiently, and has been on site to visit us to ensure that we are getting the most out of the software. Annie also coordinated between the development team within Provident CRM and our own Web Developers. This allowed us to focus on our area of expertise and ensured a smooth deployment of our new application form.
No problem has been unsurmountable for Provident CRM to resolve seamlessly and this has been very beneficial to Crosscare. We feel like Provident CRM have gone to great lengths to understand our sector and more specifically, our organisation.
The close relationship that we have formed with our Account Manager is a result of the effort that she put into learning about Volunteer Management, but more importantly having an interest in what we do and what we are trying to achieve.
