The British Society for Immunology (BSI) is a membership charity for scientists and clinicians interested in immunology. It is one of the oldest, largest, and most active immunology societies in the world and is the largest and most active in Europe. It represents over 4,000 immunologists across over 40 countries, working in universities, industry, hospitals, and research institutes. The BSI is a small team of 19 currently working remotely.
In December 2020, the organisation identified that to deliver better services to their members they needed to move to a new CRM system that would be used across the whole organisation. The aim was to enable comprehensive management of member records and support ‘member self-service’, across key activities such as membership renewal, and the annual Congress and events programme.
The BSI CRM Project Team undertook a complete review of their requirements across the whole organisation and identified the key priorities for the new CRM system. These included integration with other systems including the BSI’s Drupal 9 website, direct debit collection, third party events system, and online payment system, PayPal.
They wanted to deliver targeted communications, via the website and emails, based upon members’ preferences and interests, as well as automate key administrative processes such as welcome emails after signing-up. It was also important to have dashboards and easy reporting for system users, including the tracking of the success of marketing campaigns.
Initial discussions were held with a range of potential suppliers, all with considerable experience of working with membership organisations, and the two final suppliers including oomi, presented their systems to the CRM Project Team.
As a result, the decision was made to select oomi CRM and its modules to support membership, events, finance, grants and awards, sales and committees. The system will be integrated with Microsoft Outlook and PowerBI, PayPal, Mailchimp and with their website.
“In the end it was an easy decision,” said Otto Balsiger, Finance Director at the BSI, about the decision to choose oomi CRM. “The oomi team listened to our feedback during the process and delivered a great presentation. The system looks impressive and very user friendly and the oomi team will work well with the diverse BSI team. We are excited to be starting this project with oomi to deliver improved engagement with our members together with back-office efficiencies.”