Style Acre
“I’m really happy with it. Donorfy has enabled us to process efficiently and save a lot of time. It is an ideal platform for a charity of our size." - Philippa Stannard, Style Acre
About Style Acre
Style Acre supports over 240 people with learning disabilities and autism throughout Oxfordshire. The charity is person-centred in its approach and provides dedicated supported living teams, enabling people to live with their peers. Style Acre runs 3 dynamic day hubs, garden therapy and a work programme. It has 3 social enterprises - a tea room, second-hand bookshop and a charity shop - where people gain meaningful work experience.
Philippa Stannard, who heads up the small fundraising, communicaitons and community development team at Style Acre, explains how they use CRMs at the charity;
“When I arrived at Style Acre, fundraising data was captured on MS Access, which was too limiting. I have used and introduced to charities, a range of charity CRM solutions in my career and was keen to migrate our information to a new CRM, but needed to evidence how such an investment would improve our efficiency and improve our income potential.
"In my ideal world, I would have liked to have found a CRM solution that supported my department’s needs, as well as one that supported our operations. We looked at a couple of offerings, but they were difficult to navigate, too weighty and too complicated for staff with no prior CRM experience."
Why choose Donorfy?
The fundraising team looked at a number of CRMs, and overwhelmingly considered Donorfy to be ideal, with a sense of lightness, intuition and ease of use.
“At the demonstration, I immediately liked Donorfy’s simplicity and straight-forwardness. Being cloud-based, it is also a cost-effective option, really important for a relatively small team.”
“I realised also that I had worked with the team behind Donorfy when implementing another CRM many years ago and I liked the fact that they were trying to develop a cloud-based solution to what charities needed.”
Easy to use - even for non-technical team members
The Style Acre team were immediately comfortable with Donorfy, even for staff who hadn’t used a CRM before, showing immediate benefits of an easy-to-use platform.
Less technical team members are doing regular uploads to the platform, using the Mailchimp integration and the relationship features.
Saving time, money, and enabling direct donations
There are many Donorfy features that Style Acre use, but the automated Gift Aid processing is a stand out feature that saves the team both time and money.
Too many UK charities miss out on their Gift Aid income, or spend extensive amounts of time and resource to file their Gift Aid claims. With Donorfy, it’s fast and easy to claim that income.
“I am really pleased and like the Gift Aid element, which we’re using extensively now. The upload is easy and we’re now automating the Gift Aid processing, which is saving a lot of time.”
Donorfy’s direct donation page, which is built into the platform, is also a new fundraising feature that the Style Acre team didn’t have access to before.
“The direct donation page has enabled an ease of giving – we have certainly increased giving potential on campaigns.”
“I am very happy with Donorfy and impressed with the team, who are interested in developing the product so that it works better for charity fundraisers. For a charity our size, I see this as a perfect and realistic solution.”