Good Neighbour, a local charity that seeks to transform communities through Food Rescue, Community Gardens, providing firewood and neighbourhood projects for people who need extra help and their most recent project – a commercial kitchen training facility using rescued food. infoodle has been involved with Good Neighbour from the very early days.
For today’s post, we had a chat with Christine Hill, Administrator for Good Neighbour:
How did you hear about infoodle?
When I was employed to come and work at Good Neighbour, it was a new charitable trust and it needed systems and operations to make it easier to take it to the next level. We had lots of volunteers, supporters etc to be recorded so a database seems the tool we needed.
In my past job at Bethlehem Baptist, Richard (infoodle developer and founder) used the church as a test case for infoodle and he kept adapting it to make it work for us. Since this was a database I already knew and liked, Good Neighbour decided to take it on.
What problems did you experience before starting with infoodle?
I have seen how infoodle has helped to transform not only the church in my previous job but also through Good Neighbour.
My church job involved a lot of groups and volunteers that our team had so many excel sheets to record all the data. It was very frustrating too, every department had their own sets of spreadsheets, if someone changed their address, we had to go through all spreadsheets in each department to make sure we had corrected all the groups they were involved in, and 9 times out of 10, you didn’t get them all.
What changed when you implemented infoodle?
infoodle was a lifesaver. Once everything was loaded, it saved us so much time. Literally days sometimes, both physical and mental time was saved. We could simply make one change, add groups, sub groups, notes, email etc and everyone was up to date. So once I moved jobs and had to set up systems at Good Neighbour, it was a no brainer in getting infoodle involved. It’s so simple and the infoodle team are always so helpful and they work so hard in making their database work for us in the way we need it.
Charities are often characterised as being time poor, one of infoodle’s main aims is to help charities spend less time on administration and more time to pursue their mission.
When coming to Good Neighbour, I knew infoodle so I was able to do most of the loading up for everyone here, we have 6 others who use and add to infoodle when needed, or get me to do it. This allows everyone else to get on with transforming communities. WIN WIN for everyone!
What features or packages of infoodle do you use?
infoodle is a customisable and versatile system that allows you to grow and adapts to your growing needs. Good Neighbour started with just the CRM package, then later adding Finance and then Docs.
infoodle is great as you can pick and choose the options you need as an organisation. We use the CRM package which helps us for communications, groups, notes and forms, Finance for Donation management, receipting, campaigns or pledges, and Docs allows us to record our assets, documents, receipts, etc.
Forms by the way is such a time saver! We have connected forms with our website so people can do an online form for volunteering that sends them through to me and I press a button to accept and it automatically loads their information onto infoodle. I love it, such a time saver.
What do you like the most about using infoodle?
The creators of it! I love the fact that when I don’t know how to do something, the team at infoodle are very approachable and helpful in achieving my goals. infoodle is always being updated with new and improved aspects. It keeps me on my toes in using it. I find infoodle easy and if I need something that I can’t work out, there is heaps of help directions or you can just contact the infoodle team and they happily answer my questions or find a way to get solution for the problem.
I think infoodle has made us more professional in communicating with our volunteers, supporters, recipients etc. Every organisation has lots of administration but infoodle definitely has been a great help in maintaining and doing it all. From the very start of infoodle until now, I have seen it change into a very affordable, user friendly database system. I was there right at the beginning of it, saying what I think would be great and seeing the infoodle team create and make it happen has been amazing. I am only too happy to promote infoodle and recommend it to any other people looking for a database system.
Images and text featured in this post have been kindly provided by Good Neighbour
Good Neighbour
is a local charity that seeks to transform communities through Food Rescue, Community Gardens, providing firewood and neighborhood projects for people who need extra help and their most recent project: a commercial kitchen training facility using rescued food. For more information, visit the Good Neighbour’s website.
Contact infoodle today to learn how we can help you and your organisation.
