A bespoke CRM for the Smart Meter rollout

What our client needed

NEA were looking for a system that would perform as a CRM – holding details of the many charities, voluntary organisations and businesses with whom they would be working, and of their relationships with those partners.

They also needed to track the awards of grants and the detail of associated activities. Support and training sessions would be delivered nationwide and the system should record which partner organisations sent an attendee, and who that was.

An independent organisation needed access to the data to monitor and perform an evaluation of the project each year, while the project funder also needed read only access to the data.

Challenges

As a multi year project, it was important that the system could maintain information that changed over the life of the project.

It was vital to ensure that data recorded about the activities of partner organisations was in a structured form that could be used for reporting and evaluation, so that the actual reach of activities could give an indication of the value for money of the grant awarded.

How we were able to deliver it

We used our well established web application framework as a starting point. This already had functionality built in to handle core functionality such as user and role management, and uses a low level ‘deny by default’ approach to ensure that users only have access to data that has been explicitly authorised to them.

We developed a data structure that would correctly handle the awarding of grants to partners in one or more years, and associate their activities in each year to the correct grant. Target figures for reach can be entered at the start of each engagement period and then the actual figures added at the conclusion.

A comprehensive set of reports were developed giving both detail and aggregate information filtered by time period, status, organisation type, audiences reached and more.