Velt (Association for Ecological Life and Gardening) is an association for all that want to work in an environment friendly way in their garden or kitchen. For more than 40 years, we have been promoting healthy living at the rhythm of the seasons with respect for nature.
Velt – Samen Eco Actief
Our old ICT systems were end-of-life. They still functioned well, but it was not possible to develop them any further. Many administrative processes were still largely done by hand, which entailed unnecessary costs and errors. In order to further shape our mission at this time, we needed a system with which we could support our processes properly and professionally for many years to come.
We started from scratch. That is to say, we have completely abandoned the functionality of our old systems and focused mainly on our work processes. By working like this, we have also modernised and optimised those processes. By working in a Scrum-like way, we went step by step, from processes to configuration, access to the portal, and a fairly complex data migration. And customised where necessary. CiviCoop’s support has gradually shifted from functional to technical, where we have built up more and more knowledge internally to be able to maintain and further expand the functional side ourselves. In the end, it has certainly been a very large project for a relatively small organization, where both our core systems have been replaced by CiviCRM and a Drupal portal.
In the mean time, Jaap has been deployed at Velt for about one day a week. The first few months this was mainly due to teething problems, fine-tuning and a number of quick-wins. At the moment we have reached the point where we can start with real functional expansions. For the more operational actions we can call upon the helpdesk of CiviCoop. In addition, most of the functional adjustments are picked up and implemented internally.
CiviCRM is now the central back office system for our administration. Automated processing of new members and membership fees, donations, crowdfunding campaigns, it all goes through Civi. Also the administration of our local Velt-groups: registering activities, volunteers, sending newsletters, here too CiviCRM is the heart of the automation. The data is accessed in various ways: towards the corporate website, the portal, our webshop, etc.
And we soon already noticed that the return on investment: thanks to the online payment option, the growth of the number of members are much bigger then expected, and a number of administrative processes still only take up a part of the time than before.
The people of CiviCooP have played a crucial role in the functional and technical development. They did not act as a classic supplier, but mainly as an advisory and coaching partner. The question ‘But what do you really want?’ was regularly asked by them, until we eventually started asking ourselves the same question. Where they also regularly indicated what the costs would be, and whether we would be willing to pay for it. In addition to the ‘usual’ ICT consultancy, CiviCoop played a priceless role as an objective ‘project watchdog’ to keep the project on track. The inevitable consequence of this is that we did not develop the system we wanted to get first, but the system we really need to technically support our mission for the next ten years (and beyond).