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One central place for managing all ECF contacts

European Cyclists' Federation (ECF)

Since its foundation in 1983, ECF, European Cyclists' Federation, has had one goal: To promote cycling as a sustainable and healthy means of transportation and recreation. Their roots are in Europe, but the challenges they face are global. ECF believes the bicycle is a solution to many of the world’s woes. They therefore have an ambition to export both theirs and theirs members’ expertise worldwide. 
In October 2014, ECF was looking for help to implement CiviCRM for its staff in Brussels. They needed to import the existing database, to set and host CiviCRM. As well they wanted some training sessions and design of 7 newsletters templates.
Organizational focus
Environment
Public Health
Organization type
Association
Non Governmental
Non Profit
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Background

Provide a CiviCRM solution to the federation to manage all bicycle users’ organizations worldwide under its umbrella, the 80+ member NGOs and, networks of academics, cities, national bicycle officers and industry supporters, accessible by the 20 staff members in Brussels.

Challenges

The main challenge was the integration and management of their extensive and inter-related contacts (people, partners, organizations). At that time, ECF has four different databases with 25.000+ contacts.
The solution should been web-based, accessible by the entire ECF staff, and provide contact import and management functions in a user-friendly, intuitive environment. It should worked as tool to rationalize the contacts and provide longitudinal references to interactions with these contacts. 
Other functionalities required were mass mailing, online forms, online payment capabilities, and hosting solution, alongside user support and basic once-off training.

Functionality

Among the requirements, they needed to unify its database to improve the management of contacts, members, mailings and campaigns. ECF database consisted of:
  • A SQL database in German (Alphaoffice) which could be exported in csv with 15.000 entries.
  • MailChimp lists with more than 10.000 entries.
  • Several lists of contacts in excel sheets including MEPs approximately with 2.000 entries.
  • Lists in Outlook with less than 200 contacts.
To manage this communication, they moved from the use of Mailchimp to CiviMail with customized newsletter templates based in previous examples. CiviMail is a tool for handling mass email campaigns that provide reports on the results and effectiveness of those emails. The combination of CiviMail, CiviCampaign and CiviEvent povides ECF a complete solution.

CiviCRM was implemented by iXiam's consultants. The project team was:

  • iXiam's Project Leader: Luciano Spiegel
  • ECF Communications Officer