The Musicians Benevolent Fund

The Musicians Benevolent Fund is a registered charity which supports over 1,500 professionals within the music industry. Whether offering grants and sponsorship to help talented young people get their career off the ground, or providing support for professionals and their families in times of need or crisis, the Fund is a source of security and reassurance in a profession that is precariously scant on both.

In August 2008 the Fund began to look for a CRM system, having worked for many years with a number of in-house maintained and supported Access databases and spreadsheets for contact management, fundraising, membership, awards and grant giving. As the Fund already made use of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains), they wanted a system that could operate in a Windows environment and one which was preferably based on SQL Server. Although they expected many of their requirements to be met by a standard CRM package, they were looking for a tailored solution for their unique grant giving functions.

The Casework department allocates up to £2 million worth of grants each year to up to 1,000 beneficiaries. These grants are administered by up to 30 different categories and include regular and ad hoc payments. In addition, the Awards department allocates up to £1 million worth of grants to up to 500 individuals each year via their award schemes and up to £1/2 million worth of grants to partner organisations. Some of the individual awards are administered via auditions for musicians that take place throughout the year under different award titles.

The complex nature of the grant making system also meant that the chosen system needed to integrate seamlessly with the existing Microsoft Dynamics GP finance system, and the existing software used for making payments by BACS. As well as the ability to process all types of income and outgoing payments, the system needed the functionality to split each item to different companies, different funds, different campaigns/appeals, by gift aid-able and not gift aid-able, to different committed giving records, to vat-able and non-vat-able elements and to different contacts during income item entry.

Being such a key part of the organisation’s internal processes, it was therefore imperative that the chosen database system was able to provide the relevant flexibility and functionality that these areas require, as well as having the capability to accurately administer and record all the necessary detail associated with each payment.

For those payments which would not be made by BACS, the chosen system would also need to automatically produce the cheques required.

Data protection was another key issue for the Fund. They did not want to implement a complex and restrictive regime of record ownership, but did want to ensure that certain data could only be accessed by various departments. Whilst they wanted everyone in the organisation to have access to a simple initial contact screen, and to be able to change information on this screen, only relevant departments would have access to specific tabs such as beneficiaries/grants, donations and events. And in addition to this, different departments needed to be able to maintain confidential notes, communication logs and relationships.