British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) (www.besa.org.uk), the trade association for the UK education suppliers sector, has selected oomi to provide a new CRM and members’ portal to enable it to improve member engagement and reporting.
The BESA has a 90-year heritage serving the UK education sector, and represents over 400 educational suppliers in the UK, including manufacturers and distributors of equipment, materials, books, consumables, furniture, technology, ICT hardware and EdTech to the education market. BESA provides support, research, events and advice on both UK and International markets, and the future of the education suppliers industry. It also runs the EdTech Exchange, which is Europe’s largest network of EdTech founders.
BESA recognised the need for a new system as the incumbent CRM had limited functionality and reporting, and no integration with finance or events. As a result, there was a lot of time-consuming manual intervention, with the inherent risks that brings, and there was no ‘bigger picture’ of how members were interacting with the association.
“The key objective of the project is to improve automation and eliminate duplication of tasks between departments so we can serve our members better”, said Julia Garvey, BESA’s Deputy Director General.
oomi will provide their core cloud-based CRM, including the functionality-rich modules to support Membership, Events, Finance, Committees and Sales Management, and the oomi Members’ Portal. The project will include key integration to Microsoft PowerBI and Mailchimp and financial systems Xero and Stripe.
“The oomi team so far have been professional, knowledgeable and very helpful,” continued Garvey. “This has empowered all team members to feel involved in the project and take ownership for its success.”
Joel Trotman, Director of Sales at oomi, commented: “Our work is all about giving membership organisations the tools so they can efficiently and effectively engage with and support their members. This requires close co-operation and we are delighted to be working with BESA team on this project.”