St Raphael's Hospice get flexibility with ProgressCRM

Based in North Cheam in Surrey, St Raphael's Hospice is one of the charitable works of the Daughters of the Cross, a religious order and registered charity.

The hospice provides palliative (end of life) care for people with terminal illnesses in the London Boroughs of Sutton and Merton. Like all hospices, it accepts people of all and no faiths, ensuring that it respects the wishes and needs of its patients, families and friends at all times.

Many of its patients are admitted for a short period of time so that symptoms may be relieved or a period of respite care provided. This enables patients to return home with follow-up support by one of its specialist Home Care nurses who work closely with the hospice's doctors.

Less than 30% of its annual funding comes from the NHS. The rest comes from the local community, individuals, local businesses, trusts, schools, churches and other organisations, legacies and the efforts of the friends of St Raphael's, its shops and Lottery.

St Raphael's switched from Appeal Master to Progress in early 2005.

"We were dissatisfied with previous databases," says Keith Witham, Director of Fundraising & Communications. "Progress provided all the flexibility we needed."

The hospice's database contains records of around 33,000 supporters of their work. "Our particular challenge was not to use our database just as a contacts management and accounting tool, but to make most use of the data to expand our fundraising,"

The hospice is now targeting both the local and wider area communities with mailings, using selections of contacts from their database. Progress Queries can extract any number of records by defining geographic area, the type of record, from contact-history or any other predefined categories to exactly match their objectives.

They are also using Progress for promotion and running of events, compiling invitation lists and mailings. The Contact records flag the category of their supporters, and manages the ‘accounts' side of the fundraising.

Setting up Progress at St Raphael's was the responsibility of Fisk Brett's customer project team leader Mark Lawrence. "We worked closely with St Raphaels' on the data cleaning and conversion, as there was some concern over the integrity of the existing data.

"The Hospice also has its IT services delivered to users via several servers based on Citrix architecture. We were confident that Progress would provide a reliable and easy-to-maintain database that would be central to their fundraising activities well into the future"

Having been using Progress4 for over a year, the hospice is reaping the benefits of the powerful functionality and Query tools in the software. "Now we can segment different types of donors, and differentiate between current and lapsed donors" says Keith.

"My advice to anyone looking to improve efficiency in fundraising is to get all your data into a single CRM database and ensure the information is complete and current".

Progress is now well established, and providing the team at St Raphaels' with easy and effective data input, and simple processes to produce the statistics they need to monitor their fundraising.

For more information on the hospice and its work, visit

www.straphaels.org.uk