Sage's Sibling Reliability

CRM implementations often concern massive corporations calculating sales leads and dollar signs, but Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Rochester (BBBS), with its powerful mission to keep kids off drugs, in school, and feeling loved through one-to-one youth mentoring programs, needed a flexible remedy. As a nonprofit entity, fundraising and volunteer contacts are crucial to following through on its mission. However, dozens of separate contact lists were making it impossible for the New York nonprofit to get through the paperwork and deliver support to the kids relying on it. BBBS got a boost from Sage Software's SageCRM.com. The on-demand solution, which the organization customized to fit its specific needs, includes contact profiles that can be centralized to a single searchable database. BBBS can now use this base of information to create and manage outreach programs for each individual volunteers and donors. SageCRM.com has provided the support to enable the back office to mature. "Within each industry individual companies still have unique needs and personnel; it is imperative that the system is able to take process and human interaction, and wrap technology around it," says Bill Hoffman, Sage CRM solutions director of hosted services. Instead of managing marketing campaigns, BBBS used the solution to monitor volunteer/child matches; rather than generating sales reports, BBBS can now produce reports on the level of need per school district. BBBS's investment has paid off through a streamlining of more than 6,000 contacts, and through measuring what the organization calls "the total charitable impact of each relationship." Now the organization can focus on its most impressive metrics--enabling children to be 46 percent less likely to use illegal drugs and 52 percent less likely to skip school.