Worktrace Interactive Forms: Case Study
Case Study
Children in Crossfire is a popular Irish charity which seeks to make a sigificant and lasting contribution to eradication of world poverty. It raises money through the efforts of its community fund raising team, funds which finance projects for children in African countries such as Tanzania and Ethiopia. Bernie Ryan, their Youth Campaign co-ordinator, explains “My role is to work with schools for both educational and fund-raising purposes. I have to collect information from schools and businesses all around Ireland for events and projects. For example at the moment I am organising an project for schools to make a world-record breaking attempt for the most participants running in a relay race (www.relay1000.com).  We needed a resource to collate registration information, to store it, sort it and to use it for mailshots and mailings. We also wanted to build a contacts database to use for future projects. There are 1400 schools in Northern Ireland alone and I also deal with many business sponsors. I really needed an efficient way of recording their interest, registering their participation level, recording who is the contact in each school or company. I also needed to be able to send communications to all newly registered event participants or sponsors on a weekly basis. Previously I did this by managing excel spreadsheets and getting assistance with mail merges but it was difficult to share the workload and very time-consuming and complicated. Dealing with so many individuals means I really needed an automated way of managing these communications. Contacts and tracking our communications with them is key for us. We do have a web-site but had no integrated way of managing the information we were receving and sending out. The solution for us is the Worktrace system. Special on-line forms, designed by us, and admin tools give us instant on-line databases customised for our needs. The forms can be changed even by us and the changes are there immediately on the Web. We are being trained in these tools in readiness for the relay event. The forms allow our staff to work collaboratively entering data through the Web -that can be essential as there is always a lot of registrations close to an event. Also as the forms are on-line, schools and businesses can also register themselves. Schools address data have been imported to Worktrace automatically and can be used as look-ups when the forms are being used.. When someone registers for the event, they can be automatically be stored as a contact, extremely useful for us to build a database of supporters. With the WorkTrace administration tool of form responses, I can track who has registered in the previous week and be able to issue a communication to just the last week of respondees according to their form responses. The mailings tool will also show who has received which email or letter. Worktrace also provide a meeting record so I can record my visits to schools and their reactions. It will make my job much easier and it should benefit all the fund-raising activities in Children in Crossfire". |
