CiviCRM - Helping Students in East Africa

The School of St Jude’s provides a free, high-quality education to Tanzanian children who — due to poverty and social pressures — would otherwise be unlikely to complete their schooling. Drawn from families who often live on less than $1.25 per day, the pupils of St Jude’s are shining examples of what students can achieve when they are given the opportunity to receive a quality education.

The School is funded by generous donors and sponsors primarily from Australia but also throughout the world. In 2015, we were informed that our current database provider was no longer going to support server based applications and we would have to move to the cloud. This was not feasible for our organization owing to the limitations of internet service in Tanzania. We hired a consultant from England, Azadi Sheridan from Productle, who recommended CiviCrm and the company Veda Consulting for implementation. From our standpoint now –  we received the best advice possible.

We began looking at Civi approximately 9 months ago and we are almost at full implementation. The process was significantly quicker than our previous database implementation. Civi is a very powerful tool in the running of our fundraising operations. 

So far the benefits of Civi have been:           

1.      User friendly and intuitive. 

2.      Delivers accurate and timely financial information due to automation of data processing.

3.      Improves the bulk email communication with our approximately 2500 sponsors and the automated integration of relevant student content (eg: photos) into emails which previously was attached by hand. 

4.      Integrates sponsorship (CiviMember) records reducing the time to manage and track sponsorships.

5.      Economises staff hours - sending the tax receipts went from 7 people/1 month to 1 person/1 day.

6.      Streamlines the donor thanking process.

7.      Efficient and effective segmentation of our database for marketing purposes.

8.      Superior accessibility of metrics from marketing campaigns.

9.      Information is kept in one place and the death of many (many) excel spreadsheets.

10.  The search and reporting functions allow us to find information within the database that would take us hours or we were unable access in our old database.