Doctors Without Borders Argentina is managing fundraising and communications for their 40,000 members with CiviCRM.
Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organization 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 beginning 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, recurring 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 nonprofit and other civic-sectors. organizations. They were also looking for an Open Source, affordable CRM.
Before migrating to CiviCRM, the information was managed by an Access databases and legacy custom developments that became hard to maintain. They choose CiviCRM because it covered a large amount of their requirements with out of the box functionality and was also Open Source allowing iXiam’s team to customize it for adapting to MSF’s needs.
Which were the challenges of the project?
We had to migrate more than 10,000 records from a non-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 has.
In a project like this, technological challenges were important but another key aspect for the success was the human dimension. Dealing with change management in technological projects is not an easy task; we had to put in extra efforts to deliver quality user documentation like customized end user guides and 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 payments. We migrated more than 10,000 active donors and a large database of 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 in 2014. More than 10 different local Payment Methods are being managed by the module developed by iXiam in a controlled and secured environment. Finally, MSF is sending more than 200,000 emails monthly between newsletters and other communications.
