Established nearly two centuries ago, the Evangelical Alliance (EA) serves tens of thousands of individuals, organisations, and churches across the UK. As a membership-charity, they advocate for the evangelical community to the government, media, and other areas of influence, as well as providing support, training, resources, and facilitating gatherings to help their members to act upon their faith.
Having relied on the Postcode People at AFD as their partners in address and bank data quality for over 20 years, when a system migration was required, they sought expert consultancy from AFD to discuss their four specific requirements:
Prior to the EA migrating to a new Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) CRM system, AFD completed a comprehensive evaluation of the address data held in the member database. Tim Coysh, Head of Digital & Membership at EA, explained: “We aimed to establish an accurate contact data foundation for future communications to our members. This involved cleansing, reformatting, and de-duplicating member addresses. Identifying members that had deceased or “gone-away” from the address we held so we could suppress them from future mailings and updating members’ new addresses where possible. We recognised the substantial value this would add to both the organisation and our supporters.”
Traditionally relying on quarterly magazine mailings, the EA wanted to strengthen its relationships with members and potential members by continuing with the tried and tested physical mailings, but also expanding through the channels of phone and email. AFD’s phone and email validation was implemented to help ensure these electronic communications are going to a live, valid email or phone number.
Tim continues, “In addition to the magazine, members can select from specialist interest emails they wish to receive. The last thing we want is our members to choose specific communications relevant to them, only to not receive any due to an error in their email address!”
As members of the EA pay via Direct Debit to help ensure that its vital work can continue, AFD’s Bank Validation has been confirming account numbers and sort codes for them for two decades. On the importance of the checks, Tim said: “Without AFD’s solution, even a minor bank account detail error would prevent us from collecting payments, leading to extra administrative costs, member frustration, and might even lose new members before they even start.”
Accurate location information for organisation members, primarily churches and charities, has become increasingly crucial for people wanting to find a church local to them and facilitating member networking. Tim observed: “Many church buildings are on large sites, often without a mailbox, with multiple entrances on multiple streets. We needed precise longitude and latitude coordinates, more specific than a postal address, to guide people to the correct entrance. AFD’s Address Lookup solution is able to return this exact detail when an address is searched and selected.”
Reflecting on the project’s results, Tim stated: “Having straightened up our contact data with AFD, we now maintain its quality by catching mistakes, flagging them to members and staff AND allowing corrections to be made – before they enter our database. The AFD D365 plug-in made this possible to add address, email, phone, and bank validation – with ease. The value of more effective communication, enhanced member experience and lower admin costs saves the organisation tens of thousands of pounds (and frustration) each year.
AFD proved to be a valuable source of expertise in all the areas we’ve discussed. The insight gained from having a specialist ask the right questions to uncover the true nature of problems and guide us toward solutions cannot be underestimated, and such expertise is rare.
It would be a disaster if we were unable to validate our members’ contact data and we would spend far too much time fixing errors introduced from manual data entry. If your organisation needs to communicate accurately with your members or customers, I recommend sharing your requirements with AFD”.
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