A Brighter CRM

In August 2017, an exciting new project landed on my desk. The client was Brighter Sound, an inspirational creative music charity that supports young and emerging talent. The requirement was a CRM to help with Monitoring & Evaluation.  From the first meetings it was clear that this was no ordinary tech project, this was something bigger, something exciting - perhaps an opportunity to help an entire sector!

Brighter Sound had looked at any number of options in the market, and nothing was right for the job. They needed a way to chart the progress of their participants, collect consents from parents and guardians and dive into their data to report to their board and funders.

The key to success was immediately obvious: reporting is a chore, something that's done in a rush at the end of a project, in some cases a box-ticking exercise. It became apparent quickly, that in order to save Brighter Sound a lot of time whilst enhancing the quality of their reporting, monitoring information needed to be collected as a consequence of day-to-day processes; not by scrambling through spreadsheets, old files and hazy memories long after the fact.

The solution then was more than just a CRM, it was an end-to-end system to support the organisation's processes and a central 'truth database' to capture interactions: participation, newsletter views, donations, feedback and many more metrics from disparate sources.

Brighter CRM was born - later to become GoodCRM - a flexible, cloud-based database system designed specifically for arts organisations and non-profits.

In the months since, GoodCRM has grown to become a fully featured tool for arts organisations, non-profits and even commercial organisations. At the heart of the platform is an in-built flexibility which can be configured to support any contact management, monitoring, evaluation and fundraising application.