One central place for managing all ECF contacts
Background
Provide a CiviCRM solution to the federation to manage all bicycle users’ organizations worldwide under its umbrella, the 80+ member NGOs and, networks of academics, cities, national bicycle officers and industry supporters, accessible by the 20 staff members in Brussels.
Challenges
The main challenge was the integration and management of their extensive and inter-related contacts (people, partners, organizations). At that time, ECF has four different databases with 25.000+ contacts.
The solution should been web-based, accessible by the entire ECF staff, and provide contact import and management functions in a user-friendly, intuitive environment. It should worked as tool to rationalize the contacts and provide longitudinal references to interactions with these contacts.
Other functionalities required were mass mailing, online forms, online payment capabilities, and hosting solution, alongside user support and basic once-off training.
Functionality
Among the requirements, they needed to unify its database to improve the management of contacts, members, mailings and campaigns. ECF database consisted of:
- A SQL database in German (Alphaoffice) which could be exported in csv with 15.000 entries.
- MailChimp lists with more than 10.000 entries.
- Several lists of contacts in excel sheets including MEPs approximately with 2.000 entries.
- Lists in Outlook with less than 200 contacts.
To manage this communication, they moved from the use of Mailchimp to CiviMail with customized newsletter templates based in previous examples. CiviMail is a tool for handling mass email campaigns that provide reports on the results and effectiveness of those emails. The combination of CiviMail, CiviCampaign and CiviEvent povides ECF a complete solution.
Summary
CiviCRM implementation was overseen by consultants from iXiam, led by Project Leader Luciano Spiegel, in collaboration with the ECF Communications Officer.
