Mind | GMCVO Databases

The client

Tameside, Oldham and Glossop (TOG) Mind provide a range of services to support people with mental health issues. These include counselling, therapeutic courses, training for employers in mental health issues, active monitoring, peer mentoring, mental health advocacy, solution focused therapy, eco therapy, and many more. They also run a café, tea room and allotments which helps them offer a holistic approach to their clients’ wellbeing, with any profits going back into the charity.

The problem

In order to deliver their services, the organisation were simultaneously running 13 different spreadsheets/databases. TOG Mind saw an opportunity to centralise the information they held, in order to become more efficient and to improve communication between teams.

The search

The team began their research by talking to other local Minds and local CVS’s to find out what systems they were using and what their experiences were, then searched online for providers for Contact Management Systems. They came up with a shortlist of four systems which they looked at in more detail.

Bari Pollard, leading the team, found that CiviCRM was simple, well presented and could do 90% of what the organisation needed it to do very well. With an anticipated 40 plus users (staff and volunteers), CiviCRM also scored points for value for money due to it being open source and therefore not incurring any licence fees.

GMCVO complimented the software perfectly by offering a good support package at the right price, and as a local social enterprise, fitted well with TOG Mind’s local supplier policy.

The implementation

The project was signed off in July 2012. TOG Mind created a part-time dedicated Performance Monitoring role to take responsibility for all data formatting and handling for the initial import to the new system, and to manage data on an ongoing basis. All the new processes were designed in conjunction with staff before the launch in November 2012.

Although some of the data formatting was a challenge to begin with, the actual transfer of data was stress free and the staff embraced the new system, making implementation relatively straight forward.

The solution

TOG Mind use CiviCRM predominately as a Contact Relationship Management System, enabling them to communicate with, and manage clients and volunteers.

With over 100 volunteers with interests in different aspects of the organisation (e.g. counselling, administration, café, allotments), they make good use of the group functionality to target volunteers with information and opportunities within their specific area of interest.

Training courses, workshops and events are managed through the system, including online enrolment, online payment, and targeted marketing to potential and past attendees.

The next stage for the paid-for counselling services will be adding a payment online option. All assessment and counselling clients are sent reminder SMS messages via the system to remind them of upcoming sessions which has improved client attendance.

The benefits

CiviCRM has provided the efficiencies and infrastructure necessary to enable TOG Mind to expand. They have done this predominantly by growing their external training, something they would not have been able to do without the back-end processes and the ability to market new courses and training programmes to their database of contacts.

The management team are now able to extract key data and statistics about the services they deliver for internal performance monitoring, as well as for providing to funders and stakeholders.

They boast an impressive 300% growth in income over a three-year period, something they are convinced would not have been possible had they not have implemented CiviCRM.