Arts Council funding gives Plymouth Music Zone opportunity to implement thankQ CRM
Howard Lake | 26 March 2013 | News
Plymouth Music Zone (PMZ) is an award winning music charity that believes passionately in the power of music to reach out and help transform the lives of some of the most vulnerable children, young people and adults across Plymouth and beyond. The charity is known as a Centre of Excellence for cutting edge community music, engaging over 1,000 disadvantaged children, young people and vulnerable adults with over 50 weekly activities, delivered by up to 25 music leaders.
PMZ holds nearly 8,000 participant contact records on an Access database, nearly all of whom require restricted access rights around protecting vulnerable people. An Outlook database holds a further 2,000 contacts of partners and stakeholders. There is no supporter and donor database, with gifts being recorded with paper filing and records.
The charity recognised that there would be substantial benefit in bringing these three core areas together into one integrated system, so, when the charity was awarded Arts Council England Catalyst funding, it was decided that part of the funding would be used to create a robust yet flexible CRM system to bring together data on participants, supporters and stakeholders in order to manage relationships effectively and sustainably.
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PMZ selected thankQ CRM as it is a modular solution that is flexible and scalable and so can grow along with its charitable activity and fundraising. thankQ functionality will help PMZ develop a number of income generating activities, including individual giving, major donor development, trusts and grants fundraising and legacy management. In addition, thankQ will help PMZ improve its business processes, notably the capacity to quickly and easily pull off KPI reports to enable effective project monitoring and evaluation, in addition to impact measurement.
thankQ’s integration with Twitter and facebook will also give PMZ the ability to develop relationships on platforms that are relevant and accessible to their key audience.
Debbie Geraghty, Development Director for Plymouth Music Zone said of the appointment, ‘For us having a new CRM system is all about further developing and maximising the quality and impact of our work. A vital part of that is enabling our supporters and stakeholders to be more central to helping us reach out and transform people’s lives through music. We were very impressed with the capabilities and functionality of the thankQ system. In particular, the user interface and the potential integration with social media were big factors in our decision since we have such a growing online community’.
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.