Charity Finance Directors' Group

elegant membership solutions in a tight time scale

Founded in 1987, the Charity Finance Directors' Group is an umbrella charity with the aim to advance public education in and promote improved standards of management in charities. Started initially by a group of finance directors of large charities who felt they would benefit from sharing information and cooperating in certain areas, CFDG today is a dynamic network of professionals in charity finance with over 1,600 members.

CFDG is active in the policy arena as well as in education and training and provides information and support for members and the wider charity sector on different levels.

project background

CFDG needed to update an elderly system which was neither coping with current needs nor able to address future requirements. A tender was issued late in 2007 resulting in ESiT’s thankQ database being selected in July 2008, with the live system required to be in place by October 2008. This short timescale was driven by CFDG’s need to have the new software ready for use before its annual conference.

members

As a Membership organisation, CFDG needs a robust, comprehensive system to deal with all its regular administration, including processing new members, renewals and payments. To achieve this, thankQ’s standard Membership module, already a close fit to CFDG’s requirements, was further enhanced by linking to the CFDG website to allow visitors to apply to join the organisation online and existing members to maintain their contact details and access members-only content. The website also encourages networking between members, who can perform searches of varying complexity to find one another based on their interests or expertise. Throughout the year, CFDG provides a full programme of events for its members including members’ meetings, conferences and training courses. The Events module was adapted, and again linked to the CFDG website, allowing members to book onto an event and select the streams they wish to attend, make their payment and receive a confirmation letter as a pdf attached to an email.

elegant solutions

CFDG’s organisational needs demanded a high level of sophistication from its new system. The ESiT Project Team responded with some elegant yet practical solutions such as integration with event planning software ‘Perfect Table Plan’. A simple two step process allows bookings to be taken from thankQ and presented within the table planning software which will be used to arrange the organisation’s Annual Dinner. In the Finance module, a simple time saving wizard was added to generate a Source Code based on department, financial year and activity. This allows a structured legible source code to be quickly produced, without risk of error. The resulting code is picked up by thankQ’s Mail Manager making a clear link between a source code and each mailing.

communication the key

Success in delivering the project before its demanding deadline rested on good communication between the two project teams. Both CFDG and ESiT gave full commitment to the project at the highest level, meaning the entire process from initial contract negotiation through to specification and discussion during user acceptance testing was conducted swiftly and thoroughly. CFDG allowed sufficient, dedicated staff time to keep the project moving and a rapport was soon established where everyone could speak frankly, confident that opinions and suggestions were being heard and the resulting decisions rapidly acted upon.

“I was amazed to be called directly by the data transfer programmer himself! We quickly established a good basis for communications and were in touch regularly through to project completion. To make a programmer available to the customer in this way was both an extremely refreshing approach, from a software supplier, and a very effective means of progressing the project during the data transfer phase.

I found all the ESiT staff who worked on the project to be friendly and professional. They were focussed on our needs as a customer first and foremost.

We had complete confidence in ESiT's ability to deliver and felt there was no issue that could not be overcome without putting our heads together and working out a solution between us.”

Michael Dykes, CFDG Membership Manager

CFDG (PDF - 47KB)