Previously, VAW had been running a bespoke CRM, custom built by a previous staff member who was now consulting for the organisation. Although this CRM did meet a lot of their needs, it was proving difficult and expensive to develop new functionality. They were also concerned about their lack support options - what would happen if this consultant was run over by a bus, or decided to stop supporting the organisation? Their consultant advised them to go with a more widely used system and recommended CiviCRM (he would have probably recommended it the first time about, but it didn't exist at that time) as a system that could do everything that they were doing at the moment, and more. Switching to CiviCRM meant that they would be able to shop around for support, further development and training, etc. It also meant that VAW could jump on the 'CiviCRM upgrade path' and benefit from new functionality as new versions of CiviCRM came out. The organisation could immediatley see that CiviCRM was a good match for their needs. They were already doing mailings, events, membership and activity recording in their current CRM and CiviCRM had out of the box components for these. They also appreciated the way that CiviCRM allowed them to store individuals and contacts seperately and model the relationships between them, e.g. employees, volunteers, trustees, etc. Both Salesforce and SugarCRM were evaluated but neither matched their data model and requirements as closely as CiviCRM. They were also put off by the lack of options for hosting their data that Salesforce offered and were concerned that (although Salesforce does have a non-profit friendly licensing model) they would have to start paying expensive licence fees to make use of the best bits of Salesforce.