Data Migration is critical to the success of your CRM solution. The Royal Air Forces Association case study highlights how to implement a succesful data migration project.

The Client

The Royal Air Forces Association, one of the largest membership associations in the UK, partnered with CCR, a leading data migration and data cleansing company, to migrate the data from itsexisting database tothe newly selected CRM solution,Salesforce to allow the Association to more effectivelycommunicate with its 61,000 members.

The charity also partnered with Atlantic Technologies as its Salesforce integration and support services organisation to replace the existing CRM solution.

The Challenge

The Association’s legacy system was out-dated and highly bespoke with much of the data dating back to the 70’s and not necessarily operationally vital. This limited the Association’s ability to effectively perform many essential CRM functions including running targeted campaigns. The new system needed to be able to incorporate existing data, assist in fundraising, billing and collecting subs and ensure it was easy to keep in touch with the Association’s members.

The Solution

CCR offered a fixed price for the project providing the Association with a clear view of the work required and the total budgetary implications of the project from start to finish.

CCR brought together the Association stakeholders to help it make vital decisions about the historical data and future use of the system including:

  • What data to keep,ditch or archive
  • How the data would interact with the new system
  • If any cleaning, updating or restructuring of the data was needed

A successful data migration project was implemented by:

  • Conducting an initial audit of the data, highlighting data records that needed cleaning, updating, or deduplicating.
  • Analysing a full set of the Association’s legacy data to identify the amount of records, fields and tables it was using
  • A clear map was created outlining data sources and their destinations with a list of all the tables in the database, the number of records in each table and the relevant types/names for each field.
  • The Association then provided screenshots of known individuals in the database whose details they could confirm as correct. Using this, CCR checked that, if they analysed the same individual, it showed the same details.
  • The data was then cleaned, deduplicated, formatted, manipulated and coded, before being loaded onto a parallel but non-live version of the system to allow for comprehensive testing, before being made live.

Results

CCR consolidated and cleaned the entire database, transferring over 520,000 rows of data across the organisation.

The final migration of data was completedon time and on budget, ensuring all business processes continued uninterrupted.

Nick Bunting, Secretary General, RAF Association, comments:

“This project would not have succeeded without CCR’s help and expertise. Data migration was an essential part of our CRM strategy. CCR and Atlantic Technologies, delivered a successful data migration, helped improve efficiencies and made the process seamless.Our team isnow working with clean, consolidated data and we are able to have meaningful conversations with our supporters.”

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