CiviCRM goes live in 4 weeks to help membership renewals

Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL)

The Chartered Institute of Linguists serves the interests of professional linguists throughout the world and acts as a respected language assessment and recognised awarding organisation delivering Ofqual (Office of Qualification and Examination Regulation) accredited qualifications. The Institute is also actively involved in language issues at both a national and an international level. Founded in 1910, the Institute now has over 6,000 Fellows, Members and Associate Members. It acts as a forum for linguists in all areas of professional and academic life and its authoritative journal, The Linguist, contains articles of both academic and practical interest. The project has successfully met CIoL’s needs primarily for effective web enabled member/contact management, renewals (including direct debits), regular marketing/newsletters and events. Other areas where the solution will meet CIoL’s requirements include forums, directories and e-commerce for shop items.

Organizational focus
Education
Organization type
Association
Educational
Non Governmental
Non Profit

Background

To provide a system capable of handling membership, renewals (including paperless direct debits) and sending out regular newsletters.

Challenges

There was a key requirement to move away from an access database and various spreadsheets towards having one system capable of handling all of CIoL’s CRM requirements. There were very challenging timescales to implement the solution quickly to cleanse and transfer the data, send out renewal reminders and set up direct debit functionality.

Solution

The idea of Open Source as a possible solution was a totally new concept for CIoL. Once all the advantages were known then CIoL were keen on CiviCRM for a number of reasons – mainly due to it’s focus on the needs of NfP Organisations and this was re-inforced by NfP Services’s experience with implementing for similar organisations (also involved in providing similar services in the Education and Language sectors). Other systems including Microsoft CRM were also evaluated.

Functionality

Fully web enabled - Membership (join on line), Events - on line booking/payments, bulk emailing/self profiling - some of the main elements

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