Life Cycle UK is a small, innovative, UK charity which aims to transform lives and the environment through cycling. We run a range of practical services and projects designed to help people to overcome the barriers stopping them from cycling – anything from confidence boosting cycle training for adults who haven’t ridden a bike for 20 years and want to ditch the car and cycle to work – to a range of "inclusive cycling" projects which target specific disadvantaged groups.
These 'inclusive' projects include ‘Two’s Company’ a project which, with the help of sighted volunteers, offers blind and disabled individuals opportunities to enjoy days out cycling on tandem bicycles, for free; and ‘Bike Back’ a bicycle recycling project based at Bristol Prison where we teach bike mechanics skills to prisoners, giving them a meaningful way to spend their time inside and saving unwanted bicycles from landfill in the process.
Set up in 1996, Life Cycle first moved to CiviCRM in 2012 after our new Director decided we needed to come to terms with over a decade of underinvestment in IT infrastructure and completely revamp our website and antiquated back-end database and booking systems.
18 months later, our Drupal integrated website allows hundreds of customers and service users every month to register for cycling lessons, bike maintenance courses, or to reserve their place on one of our supported group cycle rides. Having CiviCRM in place so that we can easily keep tabs on multiple events, their participants and track the entire journey of interaction with Life Cycle of individual service users has saved our organisation hundreds of hours of administration time and helped to make our services much more cost-effective to deliver.
We also use CiviCRM to keep track of our fundraising efforts, providing a single, clear system which allows us to track our ongoing relationships with the Charitable Trusts and Foundations who help fund our work – something which until worryingly recently we had been relying on an Access 2000 database to track. We have also made use of Civi’s online event registration to sell tickets for several community fundraising events and will soon be using CiviCRM to launch a Supporters Scheme to collect small monthly donations from individual donors – once we have installed a Gift Aid collection module.
While there are undoubtedly even more features of CiviCRM which we would benefit from using as an organisation (but haven’t had the time to explore yet), it is testament to the usability and utility of the system that, even in a small team where the majority are self-confessed technophobes, we can no longer imagine life without CiviCRM and going back to our old ways!
