Samaritans turns to thankQ for CRM and fundraising solution
Howard Lake | 8 January 2013 | News
Samaritans provides confidential support for anyone struggling to cope, across the UK and Ireland. Their volunteers are available round the clock, every single day of the year. Samaritans has 201 branches, with more than 20,000 volunteers, offering the service by phone, email, SMS, letter and face-to-face.
Samaritans’ central charity provides leadership and central support services to the 201 affiliated branches. The organisation is following an ambitious strategy for growth and development which has already seen income increase by 36 per cent over the last two years following a decision by the charity’s Board of Trustees, to invest in the central charity’s fundraising capacity.
As a result, Samaritans decided it was the right time to invest in a new fundraising and CRM system to support their fundraising strategy. The primary business objectives in selecting a new system were to simplify and streamline its current processes and to better integrate with the existing infrastructure, especially its finance package. In addition, the fundraising team wanted to be able to improve their reporting capability with the ability to easily produce generic, custom and ad-hoc reports. During the selection process, thankQ demonstrated a very close functional fit which would require very little configuration to fulfil the fundraising team’s requirements and bring together its disparate systems into a single integrated view.
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The charity also placed a great deal of importance upon choosing a supplier with the right cultural fit. Daniel McAllister, Interim Direct Marketing Manager at Samaritans explained, “previous experience has taught us that the quality and culture of the supplying organisation is as critical to a successful project as the quality of the software product itself. thankQ demonstrated a flexible attitude and a willingness to work collaboratively with us to help clarify our needs, adapt our processes and show us how thankQ can help us achieve our objectives.”
thankQ will handle all of the central charity’s CRM and fundraising activities, allowing Samaritans to improve its targeting and increase return on investment from its fundraising programme. These improvements will also lead to a deeper understanding of, and closer relationships with, its donors and stakeholders.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.