Since 1967, the international non-profit organization Cord (www.cord.org.uk (opens in new tab)) has strived to promote peace in troubled nations in Africa and Asia, most recently Chad, Burundi, Cambodia and Myanmar. Based in the U.K., Cord maintains personnel in each country to work with local communities and help people suffering in the aftermath of conflict.
The need is great. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in countries that have recently experienced civil war, and nearly half of states emerging from conflict relapse into violence within ten years, according to statistics collected by Cord, winner of the Coventry International Prize for Peace and Reconciliation. Some 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict.
Cord’s work is largely about connections—connecting with people in affected countries to promote peace, gender equality, human rights, HIV prevention, education, infrastructure and more. Accomplishing that mission requires connecting with individual and corporate donors, who contributed about $4.7 million USD to Cord in 2012.
What wasn’t connected was Cord’s business applications and IT infrastructure. The organization struggled with on-premise silos of donor and financial data scattered across a Greentree ERP application (opens in new tab), Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Staff wasted valuable time piecing data together, fund-raising effectiveness was undermined by poor visibility into its 15,000-member donor database and teams had difficulty getting an accurate, timely view of budgets.
Refocusing Energies on the Goal
That’s changed with a fall 2012 implementation of NetSuite and NetSuite CRM (opens in new tab) through the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship program, which arranges free and deeply discounted software for charities and qualified social enterprises. Cord now has a single, integrated view of donor and financial data, and a set of built-in marketing tools to better communicate with and broaden its donor community.
“NetSuite has changed our whole fund-raising function. It’s very easy to use, very intuitive, and the reporting and dashboards are great,” said Susan Barlow Fundraising and Marketing Manager at Cord. “NetSuite is the solution to all our problems in one bundle and is absolutely the springboard we need to reach more beneficiaries in Africa and Asia.”
Selected over software systems from Salesforce.com, Blackbaud, Donor Strategy and Advantage Fundraiser, NetSuite meets Cord’s requirements for a single cloud-based system that eliminated the risk of interruption to on-premise systems and offered scalability as Cord grows, with a goal of doubling income by 2016.
Implemented by NetSuite partner First Hosted Limited, NetSuite European Solution Provider Partner of the Year for 2011-13, NetSuite is helping Cord personnel work more efficiently and effectively towards the organization’s goals of peace, relief and development, rather than struggling with disparate data and in-house IT.
“NetSuite is safer than having data on your own server and running the risk that something goes wrong,” said Barlow. “We wanted something that would grow with us and found an outstanding solution in NetSuite.”
Learn more about Cord at www.cord.org.uk (opens in new tab), and NetSuite.org at www.netsuite.org (opens in new tab).
