- Action for Blind People
- Aquila Way
- Customer quotes
- Directory of Social Change
- Dreams Come True
- Evangelical Alliance
- Farleigh Hospice
- Farleigh Hospice business
- Lincolnshire Wildlife
- One Parent Families
- Perennial
- RSA
- Shakespeare's Globe
- SightSavers International
- Soil Association
- SSAFA Forces Help
- St Raphael's Hospice
- Sussex Wildlife
- The Children's Trust
- Thrive
- Vision Aid Overseas
The Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families' Association (SSAFA) Forces Help is the leading national charity committed to helping and supporting those who serve in our Armed Forces, those who used to serve, and the families of both. It provides a reliable, caring and trusted service to more that 50,000 people each year.
Its professionally trained staff and network of 7,000 volunteers provide practical and financial assistance, emotional support and a wide range of services to ensure that SSAFA Forces Help makes a real difference wherever there is a need and whenever anybody turns to them for help.
Their legacy bespoke 'Contact Management System' had long since not been able to offer the fundraisers enough functionality and performance, and SSAFA Forces Help chose Progress in 2003. "Users had been updating records incorrectly, and we had a lot of inconsistencies" explained Database Administrator James Yankah-Ashun. "Our evolving business requirements and processes led to the need for a new database to replace our IBM AS400 bespoke database. "We needed a flexible system, and having looked around, we chose ProgressCRM for that flexibility"
"Having installed Progress, plans and testing were the next order of the day" recalls James. "As well as further development and tailoring to suite the needs of the other areas of the association's business such as our branch network, we had the task of migrating 65,000 records! It was an enormous undertaking, carried out over many months."
SSAFA has now been using Progress and its modules to great effect over three years. James Yankah-Ashun explains what modules they use; "Progress' Events Module enables our organisation to run its heavy training and conferences schedules. The Direct Mail module is used for segmenting our different types of donors and for major mail outs and tracking how many donations we are receiving. And we use the Relationship Module for our Branch and Divisions' appointments; these appointments have to be linked to over 100 of our Branches and over 800 Divisions!"
A new User Defined tab was developed for SSAFA Force Help publication subscriptions which is sent out on a regular basis to its supporters. And of the Query Module, James Yankah-Ashun said "It gave us the flexibility of running queries and exporting the data for analysis in Microsoft Excel and as a data source for mail merge."
For more information of SSAFA Forces Help, visit www.ssafa.org.uk
SSAFA Forces Help use TaskCentre too
The business automation module 'Task Centre' was introduced in 2006. "Task Centre enables us to track updates and significant donations entered onto Progress" explained James.
The module can be set to perform any number of routine tasks automatically. "For example" said James, "If a donation for a large amount is entered onto Progress, an email is sent to Director of Appeals to send a personal thank you letter. And if a new appointment is added or closed, an email is fired to the relevant department to confirm the update is correct"
