Canal & River Trust: Charity CRM Success Story
About the company
Canal & River Trust are a charity that manages and maintains the rivers and canals throughout the middle and south of England. This includes improving the walkways around the rivers, regular checks for water health, managing licences for boats using them, and reporting and repairing locks and equipment found throughout the country.
The problem
As time went on and the size of the charity grew, Canal & River Trust were finding it increasingly challenging to manage all of its front-facing operations. They were reliant on a number of different systems that each handled specific use cases.
This meant managing a number of arms, including donations, licencing for boats, checking and maintaining the waterways for animal life, operating and repairing the infrastucture throughout, and appealing for donations to name a few.
Speaking with John McKenzie, the trust’s CRM Specialist, a solution was needed that connected all of these data streams. This was especially challenging following attempts to implement a CRM in the past, where the team found that adoption was one of the biggest hurdles they faced.
They needed a CRM that offered extensive integration support, and a partner that prioritised this requirement. That’s where enable stepped in.
The Solution
The Canal & River Trust contacted enable.services for a consultation regarding a SugarCRM system to unify all aspects of the business. After scoping out their initial requirements, we got to work on building a system that brought together all of the vital operations needed to maintain a healthy stream of communications logging, plugging systems into the CRM via our integration platform enableFlow.
This has unlocked the potential of the Canal & River Trust to fully control its funnels for donations, event management, boat licence management, marketing, and more.
But the system has also proved to be the catalyst for adoption with the use of Sugar Connect. The charity found that attempts in the past to implement a CRM were falling short as the users simply weren’t taking advantage of the system, and this resulted in fragmented data.
Sugar Connect, which brings the CRM to Outlook or Gmail via an extension, generates interest and adoption of the CRM system to more people that otherwise would have stuck to traditional spreadsheets and previous data storage methods. The result is a more connect, improved network of data coming into a single source, so all the information needed is in one place.
The enable.services Impact
One the biggest pain points for organisations of all shapes and sizes is the lack of aftercare once a project is complete. This was no different for The Canal & River Trust with their previous attempts to implement CRM. We at enable understand the importance of CRM aftercare. A CRM is not simply ‘one and done’, but a growing and ever evolving ecosystem.
That’s why we have an in-house helpdesk team that are always on hand to help (the biggest helpdesk in Europe for SugarCRM), and a projects group that are ready for when our customers want to take the next step in their CRM journey.
This is especially important when a company has struggled with software adoption in the past, like The Canal & River Trust had. And it’s why we’re proud of our record to deliver systems that our customers understand and utilise to their full potential, and continue to work with the charity to produce their best results to keep the waterways of England running smoothly.
