Note: GPZ Services is not the actual name of this client. Because this case study involves explanations of some of this client's internal processes, we're giving them an assumed name here. Please contact us if you have more questions about this project.

GPZ Services is a mid-sized international non-profit which conducts a series of annual events to bring together participants from diverse backgrounds in a search for solutions to the world's social problems.  For the past several years, GPZ had been using a custom-built contact relationship management (CRM) system which they had developed carefully according to their own unique needs.  

Although this system had served them well, they found that with recent reductions to their in-house development staff, the regular maintenance and improvements that such a system requires would soon be beyond their means.  With this in mind, GPZ approached NS Web Solutions based on the success of several small projects and one large Drupal build-out we had completed for them in the past, hoping to find some existing solutions that could meet their needs and be better maintained than their in-house bespoke system.

After carefully examining their existing system and discussing GPZ's needs with several of their key staff, we suggested that a community-supported open source CRM product like CiviCRM could provide significant savings in the cost of maintaining and continually improving the generic aspects of data management, while still allowing them to build in the features that were unique to them. Working together with their Director of Operations, we began working on a series of improvements and additions to the CiviCRM base.

Below is a series of videos showing some of the more unique features NS Web Solutions developed for this project. 

"Active Event" setting

Since the client's staff are normally working with only one event at a time, it helps to be able to tell the system once which event you'll be working with, and then have it remember that event for all event-related actions.

In-place editing for multiple contacts

Staff often need to perform similar tasks with multiple contacts in a short time, and clicking through to find, edit, and save each one can be tedious. This video shows how we relieved some of that tedium by creating one-page edit forms for multiple contacts.

In-place editing with greater detail

In some cases, more fields need to be edited for each contact than can be accommodated in a simple list format. This video shows an alternative layout we built for many such cases.

Browsing contact relationships

This client makes heavy use of CiviCRM's contact relationship features. We built some additional features to allow facilitate navigating through those relationships to find connections between contacts related through multiple degrees of separation.

Report sorting and grouping

Based on the client's experiences with their previous system, they expected to be able to adjust the sort order of reports, and to great group headers for report rows. We modified CiviCRM's report framework to allow this flexibility.

Overall we found CiviCRM to be very capable of supporting this kind of customization. This kind of flexibility, along with the great out-of-the-box CRM features that are standard for CiviCRM, are a big part of what keeps us coming back to CiviCRM to give great value to our clients.