CiviCRM: Better Relationship Management

CiviCRM: Better Relationship
Management

Prior to setting up Pooka & Co, our Directors Marcus and Paul worked in charities and non-profit organisations for many years. As a result, we know how important it is to have the right tools to engage your members, drive donations, run successful campaigns and to make a persuasive case to funders.

That’s why we specialise in integrating WordPress websites with CiviCRM – the world leading Open Source Contact Relationship Management system for non-profits and membership organisations.

Why CiviCRM?

CiviCRM is a fully-featured Contact Relationship Management system which offers tools to manage contacts, events, payments, project workflows, and communications such as email, SMS and postal mail campaigns. It allows your website users and members to register for events, update their details, renew their memberships, make donations, sign up for newsletters and much more.

Pooka & Co’s team have worked with CiviCRM for over a decade, both as users of the software and as consultants. As such, we are experts in customising CiviCRM to each of our client’s needs. We’ll work closely with you to understand your organisation’s workflows and to implement CiviCRM in a way that streamlines your activities, opens up communication with your audiences and makes reporting fast and reliable.

Our team are core contributors to CiviCRM, which is used by over 11,000 organisations worldwide.

Like Salesforce, for Non-Profits

You may have heard of Salesforce – a leading commercial CRM system with many of the same features of CiviCRM. Unfortunately, the licensing, implementation and ongoing support costs of some commercial CRM systems can mount up quickly, making them expensive to implement and maintain.

CiviCRM is an Open Source system like WordPress, meaning there are no ongoing licensing fees associated with the software, so it can be extended and adapted freely to suit the needs of each of our clients.

CiviCRM can provide a more cost-effective solution than Salesforce, built from the ground up with non-profits, charities and membership organisations in mind. This makes it a great fit for many of our clients.

Improvements and enhancements to CiviCRM, commissioned by organisations using the software, are regularly incorporated into the core CiviCRM software and made available to all its users without charge. This means that CiviCRM is constantly evolving and improving, and that users can have a direct impact on the functionality available in the software.

If your team needs to drill deep into your data, to better understand and engage your supporters, Civi is the go-to, cost-effective CRM with no ongoing licence fees.

CiviCRM Training – Get On Board!

As integrators, trainers and developers of CiviCRM, Pooka & Co have supported charities and membership organisations to implement, maintain and make the most of their CRM systems for over a decade.

As well as implementing CiviCRM from the ground up, we’re often asked to take on the hosting and support of an existing CiviCRM installation, or to migrate data from another CRM system or database. If your organisation is looking to make better use of an existing CiviCRM integration, or to move to CiviCRM, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to work out the best route forwards with you.

As well as offering bespoke online and in-person training sessions in CiviCRM, tailored specifically to the needs of your organisation and team, Pooka & Co provide video training to all of our Civi users. Directly from your WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to access our core suite of Pooka & Co CiviCRM training videos, plus a suite of bespoke training videos that we’ll make specifically for your organisation.

Beyond Pooka & Co, networking with CiviCRM’s global community of like-minded users is a key benefit of getting involved with the platform. We actively encourage our clients to get involved in the wider CiviCRM network, and become Civi experts themselves!

In-house MailChimp

As an all-in-one CRM system, CiviCRM provides a full suite of marketing and communication tools. You can create and manage mailing lists that can then be used for email, SMS text or postal mail campaigns.

These tools include an intuitive MailChimp-like email builder, which allows you to create great looking and responsive email campaigns, which can be sent directly from within CiviCRM at no cost. What is more, CiviCRM will keep track of email opens, link clicks, bounces and unsubscribe actions, allowing you to report on the success of each campaign.

Alternatively, you can set up triggers in CiviCRM to send transactional emails to your contacts automatically, based on their interaction with the CRM or your website. This will allow you, for instance, to follow up events participants automatically with post-event evaluations, or to remind expiring members to renew their subscriptions.

“We’re delighted with the website that Pooka have built. The team have been creative, professional, adaptable and generous towards this complex project, fulfilling and exceeding our expectations.”

Simon Bateson

Take One Action Film Festivals

Events Management

CiviCRM includes a powerful Event management module, CiviEvent. Similar to services like EventBrite, CiviEvent allows your website’s users to register for free event places, or to pay for bookings at a range of events, such as conferences and training sessions, or fundraisers and dinners. Different pricing structures can be accommodated, as well as early bird or member discounts.

What’s more, all of that event registration and attendance data is then stored within CiviCRM alongside individual Contact Records. This allows you to understand which contacts went to which events, and perhaps to communicate with people that attended or missed certain events. Some of our clients use this to identify the “movers and shakers” in their memberships, who go to all their events!

Of course, CiviEvent will also let you run detailed reports on events attendance and income, as well as managing attendance – all without leaving the CiviCRM dashboard.

Contact Records

Contact records are at the heart of CiviCRM, and most of your data will relate back to ‘individual’ or ‘organisational’ contacts in the CRM.

Within a CiviCRM Contact record, alongside contact details such as names and addresses, you’ll see your organisation’s entire history of “touch points” with that contact. From events they’ve attended, their donations to your organisations, the committees or mailing lists they belong to, their memberships and renewals over the years, to important correspondence with the contact… With CiviCRM you’ll develop a 360 view of every contact’s involvement with your organisation.

CiviCRM Contact records are also infinitely configurable, allowing you to add as many custom fields as you require to record the information that’s uniquely important to your organisation. All of these fields can optionally be turned into online forms, so that your contacts update their own information through your website.

Learn more at CiviCRM.org

You will also be able to see a contact’s relationships with other contacts on your database – for instance, a contact on your database may be the daughter of another member, or they may have been an employee of an important organisation, or a member of a related organisation. CiviCRM will allow you to track all the important current and past connections between your contacts.

We like to think of CiviCRM as your organisation’s memory. While staff and volunteers may come and go from your organisation, CiviCRM is there to record and pass on everything that is important about each contact and member, and remain well structured for decades.

Donations and Memberships

Pooka & Co can help you set up online payment and renewals through third-party gateways such as Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal, as well as workflows to automate online membership renewals and take the pain out of administering membership schemes and Gift Aid, to allow you to focus on your core mission.

CiviCRM’s membership component, CiviMember, is a sophisticated tool for recording and tracking your organisation’s subscribers. Whether you offer free or paid membership or friends schemes, and regardless of how many types of membership you offer, CiviCRM can help you to manage and track your members, their payments and renewals.

Case Workflows

If you are an organisation that deals regularly with certain workflows, such as grant administration, admission processing, case referrals or other types of project management, CiviCRM’s CiviCase component can help streamline and automate your processes.

Using a series of configurable “Activities”, linked together into a workflow, you can track what point each of your contacts has reached within that workflow. For example, for grant administration, you will be able to identify where an applicant is within the process – Have they submitted their application form? Has it been sent to the judging panel? What was their decision? Has the applicant been informed? And on each step of the process, triggers can be set up in CiviCRM to notify the relevant individuals on your team or your partners, to the actions that they have to take.

CiviCase is infinitely configurable to meet the needs of your organisation, and can help to automate even the most complex of workflows.