Doctors Without Borders Argentina is managing fundraisign and communications for their 40,000 members with CiviCRM
Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare. MSF offers assistance to people based on need, irrespective of race, religion, gender or political affiliation.
At the begining of 2011, Médecins Sans Frontières Argentina needed a system for improving their current Database management of members, donors and collaborators. The main goals were to help the Fundraising Team to increase the amount of donors and their commitment with regular donations.
After analyzing different CRM’s they decided to implement CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector. organizations. They were looking for an Open Source, affordable CRM designed for Non Profits Organizations and CiviCRM was a perfect fit.
Before migrating to CiviCRM, the information was managed by Access databases and legacy custom developments very hard to maintain. They choose CiviCRM because it covered out of the box a high amount of their requirements and was also Open Source allowing iXiam’s team to customize it for adapting to their MSF’s needs.
Which were the challenges of the project?
We had to migrate more than 10,000 records from a not normalized legacy custom development. But the main challenge was to develop an extension that could integrate and deal with more than 10 different local payment methods in Argentina.s.
In a project like this, technological challenges were important but another key aspect for the success was the human factor. Dealing with change management in technological projects is not an easy task, we had to do some extra efforts to deliver good quality user documentation like customized end user guides and custom video tutorials.
How was the project delivered?
CiviCRM was installed and customized in MSF Barcelona Datacenter. We also developed an extension that manages Offline Payment Methods exporting and importing files for each credit card and direct debit presentations. We migrated more than 10,000 active donors and a big database of historic contributions and activities.
After almost 3 years using CiviCRM, MSF Argentina increased their active members from 10,000 in 2011 to more than 40,000. More than 10 different local Payment Methods are beign managed by the module developed by iXiam in a controlled and secured environment.
MSF is sending more than 200,000 emails monthly between newsletters and other communications.
