NIAB and TAG merge and CiviCRM helps in this expansion

National Institute of Agricultural Botany

NIAB is a pioneering plant science organisation based at the heart of the Cambridge science, technology and university communities and a thriving UK agricultural industry. In 2009 NIAB integrated with The Arable Group to form NIAB TAG. With over 80 years experience in the agricultural and food sectors, NIAB has an internationally recognised reputation for independence, innovation and integrity. The organisation’s activities have always focused on science-led plant variety and seeds characterisation, evaluation, quality control and knowledge transfer. The project has been implemented in several phases to replace several old proprietary databases and amalgamate the needs of the 2 merged organisations. All key areas are being looked after by the solution including membership, events and sales.

Organizational focus
Education
Environment
Organization type
Association
Educational
Non Governmental
Non Profit

Background

Initial Phase – For the ‘back-end’ office environment. Including all the functionality which enables the office staff (users) to manage the membership and sales of items (coming through the existing shop facility or from direct enquiries) available to members and non-members. Membership renewal handling, new membership sign up, subscriptions to newsletters, preparation of mailings (email and postal), reporting on membership status, interface with Sage Accounts system for alerting to new sales/subscriptions and consolidation of monies received/DD warned/received; All the associated packages and discounting, all the existing membership and subscription data imported; All the associated email integration facilities.

Challenges

Demanding timescales with implementation taking place at the same time as the merger of NIAB and TAG – and information being cleansed and imported from the 2 different systems.

Solution

Familiarity with Drupal and PHP and then the suitability of CiviCRM’s for NfP Organisations and NIAB TAG’s requirements. 4 other main CRM solutions (proprietary) were evaluated but open source and CiviCRM was identified as the most popular way forward.

NfP Services Team included Lead Developer (web team), Account Manager and Data Migration Consultant