Nonprofit Association Uses Technology to Gain Self-Sufficiency Resulting in a Reduction in Receivables from 49 to 28 Days
The Client
American Society of Agronomy
Measurable Result
Growing faster than their industry, the American Society of Agronomy turned to technology, gaining self-sufficiency, better insight and customer service resulting in the reduction of receivables from 49 to 28 days.
The Story
The American Society of Agronomy (ASA) is a prominent international educational society headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, with worldwide membership exceeding 11,000. Today, ASA is seen as a progressive scientific society meeting the needs of its members through publications, recognition and awards, placement service, certification programs, meetings and student activities.
The society’s management always looked for ways to capture more information on its membership, so it could identify where to add more value and better reporting. Oftentimes additional fields needed to be added or changed and that meant not only having programmers available, but spending days on re-compiling source code to include the changes and additions.
Management was particularly frustrated with the system’s lack of reports. Being completely reliant upon the programming staff to provide any information they needed. Typically creating reports required them to re-key data into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, a laborious task.
ASA also manages an extensive web portal providing information to their members and allows for some self-service functionality. However, most of the site was not integrated to their membership system.
The ASA turned to SVA Consulting to help them gain the real-time access to information they needed as well as develop self-sufficiency in applications, deeper reporting and increased customer service. As a result of identifying those needs, ASA chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM for their customer services management system. Microsoft Dynamics CRM paved the way for users to become more self-sufficient. They created commonly used queries themselves and left the task of creating more complicated reports to the IT staff.
“This solution brought us into the modern world,” stated Ian Popkewitz, IT Director of ASA. “We were able to recreate 25 years of custom reporting in just over five months by leveraging SQL Reporting Services.”
By integrating their association management and accounting systems, the need to re-key information was eliminated and staff members could be more efficient. The increased level of customer service and system advances in tracking billing led to a significant reduction in receivables, going from 49 to 28 days.
The solution also enhanced the member website, a critical part of their organization. Integration of key pages with Microsoft Dynamics and their association management software further eliminated re-keying information, allowed users to modify content with IT involvement and made management of the pages easier to manage.
The Microsoft infrastructure provided ways to streamline operations and allow management to spend more time adding values to their members.
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