The virtuous circle

It may seem counterintuitive that a company specialising in software for charities and non-profits also works in the commercial sector. But at GoodCRM, we've found that embracing commercial work creates a virtuous circle - so how does our work with commercial clients support our charity clients and drive the development of GoodCRM forward?

The first thing to say is that we don't just work with anyone. We're called GoodCRM because we help people who are doing good, and we don't want our commercial work to undermine that. So our ethical policy is an important first checkpoint for all of the organisations we work with.

Let's consider the 'virtuous circle' mentioned earlier - and to explain we'll point you to an example of the same principles in action - that venerable and much loved institution, The BBC.

The BBC creates top-quality programming which is the envy of the world. It's also a not-for-profit organisation. BBC Worldwide on the other hand is a commercial organisation. It is tasked with selling all that fantastic content across the globe. But here's the rub; the income generated via BBC Worldwide is re-invested into the BBC to allow it to make even more of that excellent programming and, in turn, that can be sold on to generate even more content and so on. That is the virtuous circle I am referring to, and although at GoodCRM our operation is a little smaller, our commercial partners help us in a very similar way.

Firstly there's the straightforward economics of it: the more people we have paying to use GoodCRM, the better the features we can develop and the more impact it can give to our charity and not-for-profit partners.

Then there's the innovation; when a commercial organisation needs some bespoke functionality, we work out how that can best be integrated into the wider platform for all our clients.

A recent example of this is the application we've built for Montrose Properties - a highly bespoke CRM that integrates their existing systems and smooths out their workflows. Part of the requirement was for an appointment booking system - and this is now being re-worked to help arts and culture spaces manage their room booking and venue hire offerings.

So, by choosing GoodCRM, businesses can leverage robust and flexible commercial-grade software and give back to their local communities at the same time!

In fact this is a process that characterises GoodCRM's make-up: it's flexible enough to deal with all sorts of applications right out of the box; but it includes the facility for an entirely bespoke layer meaning it can be tailored precisely to an organisation's requirements when the need arises.