An Interview with emPower Central Coast
EmPower Central Coast is an organization that was created to help homeowners in the County of Santa Barbara make energy saving improvements to their homes. The emPower program facilitates home upgrade projects by making them more affordable through incentives, financing, qualified contractors and expert energy advice through visits from an “energy coach”. The organization recently partnered with the counties of Ventura and San Luis Obispo in Northern California to expand and serve homeowners in the tri-county region. EmPower chose to work with Cividesk as their service provider to implement and configure CiviCRM and provide training and continued technical support.
The emPower program offers many opportunities to homeowners including community workshops and educational events, hosting three to four per month between the three counties. The events are managed in CiviCRM and the database integrates well with Constant Contact for the promotion of these activities.The synchronization of our Constant Contact mailing lists with the CRM helps us save a lot of administrative time, there’s no more double data entry and we are sure that recent contacts will always be included in our communications. Before CiviCRM we had to promote and track our events using several different tools. Now we can do it all in one place and as a result we are more efficient. CiviCRM makes it easy to track participants at an event and to compare attendance from various events to better understand the interests of the community.
As Business Specialist for emPower, Sherman is in charge of the maintenance of the data and the fiscal side of the organization. He accesses project and customer data on a daily basis in CiviCRM, conducts searches and updates contacts and project data information. Sherman enjoys figuring out how to create a specific report based on colleagues’ needs using the report templates in CiviCRM and finds it gratifying to produce the finished product. He now quickly creates reports that used to take him much longer when he was comparing several Excel spreadsheets. We are able to focus on our data and better implement our program. It also helps us with analyzing the data we collect, and knowing what we need to gather. This data provides us with a better picture of our program which facilitates the promotion of the program to the community.
Using CiviCRM has helped emPower to be more efficient, better understand the impact they are making on their community, adjust their programs to fit the needs of the community and ultimately, to measure their success as an organization.
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