Barnardos Australia & SugarCRM: Advocating for Children Safety
Barnardos Australia is a child protection charity that supports 15,000 children, young people, and families yearly. Barnardos Australia’s main goal is to create the necessary environemnt for all categories above to thrive, in spite of challenging situations, including drug and alcohol issues, mental health struggles, and homelessness. The NGOs main purpose and vision is making sure that the children they work with feel truly safe.
Prior to 2020, the organisation experienced a period of quite rapid growth. However, due to its rapid expansion, Barnardos Australia wanted to ensure that the business was as modern and capable to offer a consolidated and contemporary approach to child protection and supporting families.
What we'll Cover:
Rapid Growth Led to Fragmented Operations
For Barnardos Australia, its’ rapid growth also meant it had to handle fragmented operations and siloed data across multiple systems. Also, since its’ scope of activity expanded over the past few years, the organisation was now handling data and information from diverse activities, such as child care and play groups. Across
all of those programs and those teams, they were managing their data and business processes in different ways.
SugarCRM: A Solution for Accelerated Growth
After extensive research, Barnardos Australia selected SugarCRM as a partner in their journey to overcome the bottlenecks that emerged from their rapid growth. Through technology, Barnardos Australia aimed to elevate their internal processes and the impact with families.
“We wanted to work with some with an organisation such as Sugar, who were able to really help us on that journey of elevating our practice through technology. We wanted somebody who could understand that, and then reflect that back to us in our conversations.”
– Melissa B., Executive Leader, Practise Quality, Barnardos Australia
Barnardos Australia was dealing with nine systems and wated to make all of them work in the same scope, to streamline operations and processes and to accelerate growth through consolidated data. For them, Sugar’s Sugar Sell was the only contendent that seemed to be able to meet those requirements.
SugarCRM & Barnardos Australia: A Partnership to Help Children Thrive
After implementation, Barnardos Asutalia’s activities and processes drastically improved.
After spending extensive consultations with the teams at Sugar, really understanding together the business model and designing a flexible solution that truly reflected all Barnardos’ different programs and services, the organisation can now pride itself with a solution that fits like a glove. For example, together with Sugar, the company developed a portal where children and carers can interact digitally and where we the teams at Barnardos and beneficiaries of their services can share information and communicate. The digital engagement aaspect of the NGO also changed after implementing Sugar.
“One of the big things that’s really important for us is that we can gather data from our programs and services in the everyday doing of the work that our practitioners do, so in the way that they record their interactions, in the way that they plan and review for children and families that they work with. And then we have the capacity to aggregate that data up to create that narrative about Barnardos’ impact.”
– Melissa B., Executive Leader, Practise Quality, Barnardos Australia
A Look Into the Future
For the future, Barnardos Australia aims to make their service available to an even larger pool of beneficiaries, while growing their capabilities.
“What we realized quite early on was that you need to invest in the relationship and both organisations need to come together with that mindset. You need to be persistent.
Because it’s inevitable that there are going to be bits that are tricky and challenging to work through and there’s always going to be frustration in a project of this nature and this size.”
-Melissa B., Executive Leader, Practise Quality, Barnardos Australia
For Barnardos Australia, finding the right partner to help them in giving their organization a competitive touch was the critical element that led to streamlined and aligned operations and processes.
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