Sage CRM and British Gymnastics CRM Case Study
British Gymnastics springboards to success with new membership system
British Gymnastics, the UK National Governing body, responsible for the sport of gymnastics, implemented a new membership management solution based on Sage CRM. This has dramatically improved the way it engages with its 127,000 members.
British Gymnastics is the National Governing Body (NGB) responsible for the promotion, development and management of gymnastics in the UK. Its mission is to encourage more people to get into the sport, promote activity amongst its members, secure more funding, improve the quality of coaching and promote gymnastics internationally.
Originally established as the British Amateur Gymnastics Association in 1888, British Gymnastics has evolved and grown, and today enjoys recognition and respect built by the contribution of several generations of enthusiasts.
With over 127,000 members, British Gymnastics promotes eight of gymnastic disciplines – from trampolining to sports acrobats and from the rings to the balance beam.
Advantages of the new system include:
- Web-based system eliminates time-consuming and error-prone paper or computer spreadsheets
- Enables members to log on to British Gymnastics website to book up for events and renew, add and delete membership subscriptions
- Based on Sage CRM's highly configurable platform to provide head-room for growth
Objectives
Running from 150 – 200 events a year and coaching members across a broad range of disciplines and abilities is a highly complex task for British Gymnastics. This also involves engaging with its members and clubs on a number of levels, including managing membership subscriptions, courses and awards and sending up to date news.
Previously, British Gymnastics did all of this using either paper based systems or disparate databases and spreadsheets. This process was slow, expensive to administer and prone to errors. In April 2005, British Gymnastics realised that at its next major membership update in October 2005. It needed a new system to automate many of these processes.
Alan Sommerville, Chief Executive Officer at British Gymnastics, picks up the story: “With London winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympics, we realised that the updating of our membership management system was even more necessary to prepare for increasing interest in gymnastics and to provide a more professional and efficient service to our existing members.”
Alan Sommerville and his team believed that the best way to achieve this was with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Often used in a commercial environment to enable companies to manage sales and marketing processes, British Gymnastics was keen to exploit the technology to form closer, more targeted relationships with its members.
The Solution
British Gymnastics liked the look of Sage CRM as it was intuitive and browser based. Sage CRM allows users to access the system purely via the Internet without having to install dedicated programmes. It also enables data to be stored on an Oracle database, providing British Gymnastics with the robustness and scalability it was looking for.
“One of the key benefits of Sage CRM is that it's highly customisable. Our requirements are very different to the average commercial environment, so we wanted a solution that could be developed with our needs in mind,”
adds Sommerville. “This, in turn, meant that we needed to work with a consultant that had a good understanding of both these needs and the capabilities of the software.”
To install the solution, British Gymnastics selected Concentrix, a leading systems integrator and Sage CRM specialist. “Right from the beginning, Concentrix took time to understand our requirements before designing the right solution to meet our needs. This involved scoping the solution, documenting the process and building a tailored demo so that we could see a working model in practice.”
Benefits
One of the main benefits for the organisation's members is the solution's integration with the British Gymnastics website. This allows users to logon to view and update their details, register for events and renew memberships.
Being web-based, users and managers can get information and reports from anywhere with an Internet connection. The system also provides the organisation with almost unlimited headroom for growth.
In addition, being based on open technology standards including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) means that the system can easily be changed or configured to meet British Gymnastics' needs. This also reduces reliance on Concentrix for post-sales events, which makes the solution even more cost-effective.
A further benefit lies in Sage CRM's advanced reporting capabilities. This allows British Gymnastics to measure and analyse Key Performance Indicators to help make decisions about operations and report back to UK Sport, Sport England, and the other home country Sports Councils, the organisation's main funding providers.
The solution stores data on every gymnast including their membership information, demographic information, associated club, training history and chosen events. For British Gymnastics, this can be harnessed to create bespoke reports to find out, for example, how successful a particular event or membership mailer has been.
“During the implementation phase, we have been very happy with what we've seen,”
adds Sommerville. “We're on target to go live within the next month, which is a very fast turnaround for such a large and previously untested implementation. The Concentrix solution will provide British Gymnastics with an extremely sophisticated membership management solution enabling us to provide our members with a more personal service that meets their needs.”
Looking Forward
After a turnaround time which impressed British Gymnastics, the new membership management system was rolled out throughout the organisation. Concentrix were on-hand to provide training and support services to ensure that the migration was as smooth as possible. In the future, British Gymnastics is also keen for other NGBs to benefit from its investment - enabling them to implement a similar CRM-based memebership management solution to build close, well-managed relationships with their members.
About Sage CRM MME
Sage CRM is an easy to use, fast to deploy, feature rich, low cost of ownership CRM solution, designed to introduce the real benefits of CRM to middle sized companies. Sage CRM aggregates individual and group efforts across sales, marketing and support teams, making people and companies more efficient at their roles. It links all departments to a single system that is deployed across an Internet architecture that inherently provides efficiencies in terms of deployment, maintenance and access.
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Get in touch with us!Visit The British Gymnastics website.