The Vietnamese Friendship Association (VFA) of Seattle is a non-profit organization that promotes equality in education, fosters civic engagement, and advocates for Vietnamese and other refugee and immigrant communities. The organization focuses on supporting students and families, engaging leaders and working with diverse communities to support systems changes. Cividesk recently spoke with James Hong, Executive director and Kristina Ong, Fund Development Manager about how CiviCRM has helped them accomplish their mission.
Before implementing CiviCRM, VFA chose to use Sales Force as their CRM. However, VFA staff found Sales Force to be “cumbersome”; “it was just not intuitive”, explained James. After a year, they decided to make a switch to a different CRM that was easier to use. VFA had researched several choices before making their initial choice of Sales Force, and CiviCRM had been one of those options. The staff found CiviCRM very simple to use “out of the box” and liked that it was open source. Kristina’s introduction to using CiviCRM began with data entry of donor contributions in the database. James learned how to use CiviCRM by spending time exploring the different modules on his own. “It is very user friendly”, he explained, “after struggling with using Sales Force for a year, I found CiviCRM straightforward and designed for non-profits”.
VFA created the registration form for their annual fundraising event in CiviCRM and processed the registration payment using their new payment processor. Participants loved the ease of registering and found it quite “streamlined”. Kristina pointed out that many registrants were curious about which program they used to make the form since they found it to be so user friendly. “It was a lot easier to manage the registrations this year thanks to this change to the new payment processor integrated with CiviCRM", explained Kristina.
Over the past five years, VFA has seen tremendous growth in terms of donations and has built their donor database using CiviCRM. They have better engagement with their donors since they can accurately track contributions in CiviCRM and tailor communication based on a contact’s donation history. They use CiviReport to track who is donating, how much, and when. They also better manage the promotion and follow-up after their events. Many of the everyday tasks are “getting done quicker” thanks to CiviCRM since staff finds it easy to use and an important tool in accomplishing their goals.
James has found CiviCRM to be a tool that is intuitive, affordable and functions extremely well for managing their organization and hopes that others can benefit from this open source CRM.
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