Introduction

Green & Blue International (G&B) is a global non-profit organization with an estimated 12 million members and locations in over 100 countries.

Business situation

G&B receives 100% of its funding from member donations. Like many other global organizations, G&B is challenged with managing its operations across varied geographies and markets. This has been especially difficult with their antiquated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This system is used to manage donations, support funding campaigns, organize volunteer assignments, and track donation trends for financial reporting and forecasting.

The current CRM system was developed in-house five years ago when G&B was much smaller. It is a highly complex system that is prone to user-entry errors and difficult to integrate with required third party applications.

Problem statement

Deloitte has been hired to advise G&B on implementing a new CRM system. The new system would need to be flexible and scalable enough to support future growth and expansion to additional countries, in addition to addressing other leadership concerns with the current system. G&B has been hesitant to take on this project for several years because of the high cost and risk to negatively affecting member donations.

Key considerations:

• Number of donations and amount per donation have started to decrease because various economic factors. Total donations are expected to be down 1% this year and down 6% from the peak 5 years ago. G&B has a modest amount of savings from previous years but not enough to sustain the organization if donations continue to decrease.
• CIO has raised concerns regarding the lack of reporting and forecasting tools to manage operations effectively. The current system does not allow him to plan a detailed budget or do any sort of trend analysis for donations and member behavior.
• System upgrades are initiated centrally but managed locally, by country. Many countries are two or three versions behind, leading to high maintenance costs to support the multiple versions.
• Many of G&B’s local office employees are volunteers. Their lack of experience leads to a high rate of errors entering the system. G&B would like to automate tasks to simplify data entry and reduce the number of errors.
• G&B’s management is divided between enhancing the current in-house solution and building a single global web-based replacement system.