NewsLocal, formerly known as Cumberland Courier Newspapers owns over 20 free newspaper titles in Sydney as well as metropolitan and regional newspapers.
NewsLocal recently launched a new initiative, called Project Local, to engage communities by getting their readers more involved in their local area activities. NewsLocal offers financial grants to support ideas that will help improve local communities.
Challenges
- To connect and engage with the local community at grass roots level
- Drive greater participation by their readers in local community initiatives
Solution
Loaded Technologies delivered a website that provided one central engagement platform.
- Strategy, design, development and deployment of Project Local
- User registration, upload local community initiative ideas to win funding
- Voting, social media sharing and commenting functionality
- User authentication, profile, status, activity tracking in SugarCRM back end database
- Website users can search for and view ideas that other users have uploaded, register, submit their own ideas, vote for their own and others’ ideas and share their idea amongst their social networks.
Business Applications developed and integrated:
- Drupal Content Management System (CMS): used for user registration, user upload ideas, readers view and vote for ideas.
- SugarCRM: used to marketing to contacts, monitor votes and entries, store user information, store ideas against the contact.
Results
- The initiative received huge local newspaper coverage and very encouraging results with around 5,000 registrations, 165 ideas submitted, over 19,000 votes cast and 20 initiatives funded in late 2011.
- Hard copy and online editions of all mastheads carried front page media coverage of community groups and individuals who were funded in late 2011.
- NewsLocal reader community has fully embraced this initiative and indications are that this will continue to grow as a further 4 cycles are rolled out in 2012.
Company Description:
The Australian Scholarships Foundation (ASF) is the only Australian organisation solely focused on facilitating access to scholarships for Australian not-for-profit boards and managers to undertake education, training, and development programs that improve their ability to lead and manage. ASF was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
CRM Solution: SugarCRM Professional, provided, customised and integrated by
Australian SugarCRM's partner Loaded Technologies.
Business Issue:
ASF negotiates with accredited education and training providers across Australia to provide free or discounted executive management, mentoring, and training programs in a range of management disciplines. When the foundation began operations in 2008, scholarship application, evaluation, and tracking were largely manual processes, managed with spreadsheets. But as the need for ASF’s services grew, the organization needed a system that could standardize and automate these tasks.
Requirements:
- Manage increasing transaction and application volume
- Deliver greater visibility and transparency into the application process
- Operate cost effectively within funding constraints
- Support more effective marketing and segmentation
- Enable ASF to communicate confidently with scholarship funders and applicants
Solution:SugarCRM Professional
For guidance in finding and vetting a system, foundation CEO Amy Lyden consulted Mark Tallis, Director of Consulting for Loaded Technologies, a SugarCRM Gold Partner. Tallis and his developers took an agile development approach to the ASF project, using frequent prototypes to show Lyden the solution’s capabilities and structure and to encourage her participation in the process. The first phase of the solution focused on the sales pipeline, building the processes and supporting data to manage the institutions that are providing courses and course funding or referring personnel to apply for scholarships.
Business Benefits:
- Improved management of the sales pipeline and application process
- Streamlined communication with applicants and educational partners
- Provided an easy-to-use system for volunteers and part-time staff
- Enabled email marketing to be handled in house
- Integrated SugarCRM with Moodle and Joomla
Results:
- Increased application processing capability 1000 percent
- Delivered a 300 percent increase in scholarships offered with no additional staff
- Eliminated the expense of a third-party email marketing vendor.
SugarCRM has been introduced by telecommunications wholesaler and franchisor Telcoinabox and SugarCRM Gold partner Loaded Technologies to streamline its service providers' sales processes and customer management.
Loaded Technologies has customised the system to include a billing connection module which connects Telcoinabox current billing system, Utilibill, to the service providers' CRM. This gives them a real time view of customers' billing and payment status.
The new system, SugarCRM allows service providers to:
- Execute email campaigns
- Generate leads more easily
- Better manage customer acquisition and retention; and
- Run real-time customer reports.
"Our primary focus is to continually search for ways to improve our service providers' business workflow and processes so they can focus on generating sales," said Telcoinabox CEO, Paul Line.
"SugarCRM Professional came up as the only one on the market that was flexible enough to allow us to do this"
"We anticipate even stronger turnover improvement among our service providers with this new system in place."
SugarCRM went live on 1st February 2011 and is made available to all Telcoinabox service providers through a licensing arrangement. It will be rolled out to all service providers globally, including New Zealand and the UK.