Last Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Oslo to work with MAF Norway for 2 days, together with my CiviCooP colleague Jaap Jansma. MAF Norway is a very inspiring group with very ambitious fundraising goals for the next couple of years. And they believe they need CiviCRM to make it possible for them to achieve those goals. It was an extremely inspiring visit for both parties involved.
Let me give you a little background on our involvement with MAF and the next steps with CiviCRM, and then Martin from MAF will take over the keyboard and tell you about MAF Norway and their fundraising.
About 18 months ago we got a mail from Steinar in Norway, who works at MAF Norway to ask us to introduce ourselves as they wanted to do someting with CiviCRM and there was no support in Norway. Over the months we had a couple of email exchanges and Skype conversations. And in the last 2 months we started with their first CiviCRM install, working closely together with Circle Interactive (http://www.circle-interactive.co.uk/). We do the overall project and the data migration, Circle Interactive expand the recurring payment extension to suit the needs of MAF Norway. Great CiviCRM community co-operation!
MAF Norway want to use CiviCRM for their new fundraising methods, but as a first step we have to make sure their current processes are supported. So we migrate data from their existing closed source system and configure CiviCRM to reflect what MAF is used to. If all goes well MAF should be life with CiviCRM in the beginning of October of this year. And in the beginning of 2014 we will sit down with them again to see how CiviCRM can support their new methods, what they call 'donor journeys'. Now we were talking to one of our customers once we returned from Oslo, and they have similar requirements. Obviously we will try to bring them together so we can enhance the fundraising capabilities of CiviCRM. But maybe there are other organizations that are interested too? Please read on and listen to what Martin from MAF can tell you, and contact me (erik.hommel@civicoop.org) if it sounds like something you want to know more about!
So here is Martin Aarflot of MAF Norway:
Most of todays fund raising software are made back in the 1990’s and is not made to deal with the 21st century way of communication.
MAF Norway was established in 1986, but it was first in late 2008 we started to work with fund raising in a professional way. In the beginning we got what we needed from our closed source system. We treated most of our donors the same and send out bulk letters, DMs and magazines. But when we wanted to start treating our donors on a more individual basis, we soon met difficulties. We heard about PURL, but had to pay a lot to get it developed, we wanted “my page”, but that cost a lot too. E-mail was partly integrated, but SMS was out of the question. And then we paid huge amounts in license and service hours. We started getting desperate to find something more modern and less costly and our Logistics Manager began searching the net for alternatives. When we first started looking at CiviCRM, we could not believe what we saw. So many possibilities came “out of the box”. And with knowledge about the open source community, we soon decided CiciCRM should be our new system.
At the same time we also started exploring what in the fundraising sector is known as “donor journeys”. As we went on planning MAF Norways donor journeys, we realized that the whole concept was totally dependent on CiviCRM. When we introduce donor journeys we trash all the bulk mailings and start communicating on an individual basis with our donors. We will give response when a donor contacts us first, with a donation or in another way. If we E-mail a thank you and the email bumps back, the system have to check automatically if there is a cell phone number registered. And if it is, there will be sent out an sms instead. If the sms bumps back, then our response department gets a message and we will send a thank you post card. The system then shows an alert the next time the response department looks up the donor record so that we can correct the error. Eg. if the donor calls us we can ask for the correct E-mail and cell phone number. We have several advanced flow sheets for our donor journeys that we will introduce as soon as we have transferred to CiviCRM. We can hardly wait!
