Managing Diversity & Growth with DataSync (PDF)

A case study on the largest free music festival in the nation.

Organization: LifeLight Ministries
Website: http://lifelight.org

Client Project Champions:
Vicki Greene – Co-Founder
Rob Kurtenbach – Concert & Tour Director

Key Points

• Diverse, high growth organization required robust technology to manage information
• SugarCRM a key part of managing diverse, related information
• DataSync's understanding of business processes key to project success
• Flexibility, scalability of tools key part of ongoing organization growth and success

Overview

Phenomenal growth and success have been both challenging and exciting for LifeLight Ministries. DataSync has been involved in LifeLight since 2005, and in that time has understood the unique challenges of running a highly diverse and dynamic ministry.

In 2007 DataSync launched a full scale DataSync Suite implementation centered around SugarCRM 5.0. Because of the flexibility and the fact that Sugar itself is a platform, DataSync was able to put together an enterprise class information management solution that automates marketing, volunteer management, staff management, CRM, and various other aspects of LifeLight's diverse ministry.

The Challenge

In 1998, Alan and Vicki Greene held the first LifeLight Festival on a church lawn, 1,000 people attended. Eight years later the annual music festival has grown to be the largest free music festival in the country with over a quarter of a million people attending the 3 day festival. Along with the phenomenal growth of the festival, the size and scope of the non profit organization grew exponentially. The mission moved outside of its original festival weekend and location to begin touring the country. This year LifeLight will host 50 events in 50 different cities, spreading their ministry's message across the country. This explosive growth brought great success to the organization and their mission, but success brought with it numerous growth related problems for the organization and its staff. One of the major problems was their ever expanding portfolio of information.

The Solution

SugarCRM

One of the greatest challenges facing LifeLight IT is keeping track of a vast array of related information. This organization must keep track of staff, donors, festival volunteers, tour volunteers, mission volunteers, venders, suppliers, bands, tours, events, festivals, finances, and many special pieces of information. Traditional non-profit software packages just didn't fit LifeLight's needs. Each fulfilled one or two requirements, but was far from making a full cohesive information management package.

DataSync recommended the SugarCRM platform. It was selected because of the modular nature and open source code. This makes SugarCRM a highly flexible and scalable architecture for building out LifeLight's information management solution. DataSync built over 12 custom modules on top of the SugarCRM framework, and was able to use Sugar's module relationships to allow for complex information relationship management inside LifeLight. A person can be a volunteer, a donor, a band, or maybe some or all of the above.

Sugar also allows for highly configurable email marketing. Because communication is so important to LifeLight, Sugar's Campaigns module was an integral part of LifeLight's strategy to effectively communicate with its vast array of volunteers, as well as the overall audience LifeLight serves. Hundreds of thousands attend each year's festival (2007 brought over 300,000 attendees), and Sugar enables a cost effective means to communicate with many of them.

A third basic requirement was tight integration with LifeLight's existing content management solution. By creating a “form builder” module, DataSync was able to use AJAX and SOAP to allow LifeLight staff to build web forms that integrate fully with any SugarCRM module out of the box. No complex coding or form building was required – just a simple drag and drop interface. This allows LifeLight's website and CRM implementation to grow together without spending time and money on recoding each web form to work with Sugar.

Zimbra

Team communication is a major challenge in an organization that is out of the office most of the week. With staff members touring, others going on mission trips, and others working with volunteers daily, communication can easily become non-existent. DataSync implemented Zimbra Collaboration Suite to help this dynamic communicate no matter what they day brings. Because Zimbra allows teams to share email, schedules, and contacts, it enabled LifeLight to keep track of their team no matter what. Zimbra also integrates with mobile devices allowing mobile team members to collaborate on their mobile devices on the road. Zimbra has helped LifeLight stay on track for meetings, stay current on events, and communicate more effectively.

Website Content Management

Originally launched in 2000 as a simple informational website, LifeLight.org has now expanded to 6 different sites. They not only were the primary means for disseminating information about the music festival, but provided concert and tour information, mission news, and an online store. With as many as 15,000 visitors a month, the 6 sites encompassed 150 plus pages. As the site grew it became more and more difficult for that lone volunteer to keep up with the constant changes and updates needed on the sites. Rob Kurtenbach, LifeLight Concert/Tour Director and founder Vicki Greene discussed the future of the websites, seeing more growth on the horizon for the organization and realizing the limits of their single volunteer, a solution was sorely needed. A customized CMS, built to handle the various needs and functions was the only viable solution. Over a 6 month period DataSync's programming staff worked hand in hand with LifeLight staff to ensure that the custom built CMS would adequately address all of their needs and provide for future growth. Web applications were tested by Life Light staff on a development server to be sure they would meet their unique criteria with every effort made to streamline and automate as many processes as possible. Training was provided for LifeLight’s staff so that they could take control of their own website. Said Rob, “One benefit we enjoyed was that they (DataSync) could teach and talk to us at our level of understanding.”

The Results

DataSync had come through for LifeLight, creating a highly dynamic and integrated information management solution. When asked about working with DataSync Rob commented, “It has been great, the relationship is continuing. We were already moving on to the next milestone. Even before the first phase went live, we were planning for the next phase.”

At DataSync we're thrilled to help a great ministry like LifeLight become more effective at what they do. Our goal is to create the most efficient information systems that can be deployed cost effectively, and we believe we've achieved that goal with LifeLight Ministries.