Student Voice is a UK based non-profit working to become the representative body for school students, supporting young people in representing their views on issues around education and schools. We asked Rachel Roberts, Assistant Director, a few questions on how using CiviCRM had benefitted their organisation.
Why did you choose CiviCRM as your customer relationship management system, and how do you use it?
As it’s free for any secondary school students in England to become a member of Student Voice, it was important that we had an easy way for young people to sign up and that this would link to a database which we could use to contact them.
We use Civi to easily track our membership numbers along with their ages and geographical locations. We also use it to be able to send direct emails to different groups of students. Through Civi it is possible for adult supporters to sign up and we are able to track them and contact them separately. When we are starting a project in a new area we are instantly able to contact schools and students in that area to see if they want to get involved.
How has using CiviCRM benefitted your organisation?
“Using Civi has made it straightforward for us to manage our membership database with much less time needed and far fewer confusing excel documents! “
It is also great as it's easy for any member of our team to access, and, it is always up to date!
Before we started using Civi we didn't even have one database with all our members in. We had a whole range of documents dividing the students by age, school, location and role within the organisation. There were so many documents it took us forever to find the right contact details or collate a relevant mailing list. And, the worst thing was that these were kept by different people on different computers and you never quite knew which ones were most accurate.
Now all of our members are in one place and we can all find the right ones to contact when we need to. It's really great to be able to search Civi to find the right people to tell about the right things. I can't even estimate how much time it is saving us, since using Civi our membership has grown to 25 times the size, and, this simply wouldn't have been manageable without Civi.
Is there one success story that stands out?
It was an amazing help when we found out we could get funding to work with schools in Lambeth, but in order to get the money we needed to have contact with the schools. We had a search in our adult supporter categories and lo and behold a teacher from Lambeth had signed up. After the exchange of a few emails we were able to get funding for a project working in schools across the borough for free, and if we hadn’t been using Civi to manage our contacts this wouldn’t have been possible.
Mary Mitchell is Digital Coordinator at White Fuse, a London-based digital agency for charities and member of the CiviCRM network.
