Together Trust streamlines donor correspondence with Dynamics 365

Together Trust delivers individual care, support and education services across the North West of England. The organisation cares for and champions the rights, needs and ambitions of children and people with disabilities, autism and mental health differences. 

Together Trust needed to replace its legacy CRM software with a modern cloud-based solution that would be easily accessible to its fundraising team. Trevor Kerr, Head of Digital at Together Trust, explains their challenges. 

“We were running Donorflex on an internal PC, but remote access by VPN was so slow it became unusable. We had already done a lot of work to move our structure to the cloud with Microsoft 365, so we identified Dynamics 365 as a replacement to manage our fundraising activity. 

“Based on demonstrations, Dynamics offered everything we wanted, but we encountered problems with our implementation partner and their solution. They didn’t come from a nonprofit background; ultimately, they couldn’t grasp what we were trying to achieve. 

“The Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator was the basis of our solution, but we quickly discovered it didn’t do many things and was very American in its formatting. 

“We started to incur additional expenses for bespoke development work and found that our partner was less responsive. Their priorities were changing, and we felt they didn’t have the time or attention for smaller organisations like us. 

“We were struggling to get Dynamics 365 working as intended. With only patchy training received, our project was failing at that point.” 

“We haven’t retained much from the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator because these processes were better handled in ANS’s Charity Hub.”, says Trevor. 

“Today, we are in a great position. Our fundraising team are now enjoying using Dynamics on a day-to-day basis. 

“ANS’s consultants went above and beyond expectations to research our various fundraising transactions. Rather than just telling us how to upload a transaction, they spent time setting up, improving and testing mappings from our Enthuse platform. 

“We can also use Charity Hub to record details of donor pledges for challenges such as the London Marathon and track recurring subscriptions for our lottery. Our forecasting hasn’t previously been effective, but this will give us better visibility of the expected funds due in the coming months. Inbuilt Dynamics 365 dashboards are a great starting point, and we are excited by the prospect of using Power BI analytics.” 

“From our initial sales engagement, we found ANS’s team very approachable. It was refreshing to see that they wanted to teach us how to do a lot of things ourselves. This allowed us to quickly become more self-sufficient.” -Trevor Kerr, Head of Digital Together Trust. 

Trevor also highlights the benefits Together Trust’s fundraising team has gained from native integration between Charity Hub and its other Microsoft technology. 

“We previously followed a time-consuming process to save emails into a folder and then attach them to the contact. Now we have this configured to track through Outlook. The team are delighted with how much time is saved with Dynamics 365 and Charity Hub when tracking our donor correspondence. They are also seeing the benefit of integrating SharePoint folders with individual Dynamics 365 records to simplify document management.”