SNJ (National Youth Service)
Service National de la Jeunesse (National Youth Service) is based in Luxembourg and caters for young people as well as to people who do educational work with children and young people.
Our field of action is that of non-formal education, which includes all educational activities organised outside of the formal school system. SNJ organises youth camps and educational activities to groups of young people which are complementary to school programs. We support young adults in their transition to working life by offering them individual counseling and concrete alternatives to inactivity. Our mission is to monitor educational quality and encourage innovation in non-formal education services.
What was the aim of your implementation?
The application that was used for publishing youth activities and the registration of the participants, was no longer supported and needed replacement. For that reason SNJ investigated different possibilities for a CRM system and chose for CiviCRM because of its flexibility, potential and also because it is an open source application which is in line with SNJ’s philosophy.
The approach and progress of the project
We started with a Proof of Concept to see if CiviCRM could meet the requirements of SNJ for event management and communication with our participants. When it turned out CiviCRM was (more than) adequate for our needs, we continued setting up the CiviCRM environment: publishing events, managing registrations, communication with our participants and managing the event payments.
Once that was done, the next step was to create an integration with 2 of our event websites.
The migration of the old registration turned out to be a lot of work, mainly because of ‘dirty data’. So we decided to go live first without historical data and took time to set up a good migration script and test it thoroughly.
What has been CiviCooP's role: before, during and after implementation?
We had a bit of a bumpy start, since we did not really want a new application: the current one was doing exactly what we wanted it to do. CiviCooP understood and addressed this. Once that was out in the open and we saw the potential of CiviCRM, we collaborated well together.
CiviCooP was the expert in CiviCRM, showing and advising us on how to set up the system. The business process was of course our expertise. The combination of our two key users together with a functional and a technical consultant from CiviCooP worked out well.
At this moment CiviCooP is standby in case of any support questions. A few times per year we plan a sprint to work on new functionality.
What role does CiviCRM play now?
CiviCRM is our main application that runs the event management, with an integration between two of our websites and CiviCRM.