Transforming Risk into Opportunity:
How the BDA Regained Member Trust with BlueCRM
“We really are on the edge of greatness now. For the first time, not only can we access an accurate ‘single source of truth’ for our membership data, we also have the insight to develop our proposition to its true potential.”
- Louise Pritchard
- Chief Operations Officer
- British Dietetic Association
Louise Pritchard is Chief Operating Officer for The British Dietetic Association (BDA). Having experienced the huge risk of poor data management first-hand and navigated the transition to a robust ‘single source of truth’, she explains why the BDA’s BlueCRM system delivers incredible membership satisfaction, huge benefits, and the potential for strategic growth.
Supporting the dietetic workforce
With over 12,000 members, the BDA supports the UK dietetic workforce as a professional membership association, a trade union, and a registered charity that issues research grants.
Part of Louise’s responsibility includes the digital infrastructure behind the association. This must collect and manage the vast amount of data that runs operations day-to-day.
“Our data is crucial to daily operations,” said Louise. “While it helps us stay in touch with our members and manage their subscriptions, at its most basic level, it also helps gather data intelligence to inform how we improve the association, develop services, influence in the arena of food and nutrition, and advance the science and practice of dietetics.”
What’s more, many of the BDA’s members have incredibly busy jobs in the NHS. They need to be able to manage their membership and benefits quickly, whatever the time of day or night.
I feel strongly that other organisations should benefit from the successful outcome we have enjoyed through our partnership with Bluelight. Ongoing, I hope to work with Bluelight to help broadcast our message of what a good digital change project should look like.
- Louise Pritchard
- Chief Operating Officer
- British Dietetic Association
When your data becomes a strategic risk
When Louise joined the BDA, she inherited a recently launched CRM system. But four months in, problems rapidly mounted.
“Initially, direct debit downloads failed. Next, duplicate records were cropping up and membership data was missing. This escalated with multiple unique issues,” said Louise.
Member complaints started to roll in thick and fast. For some, the wrong amount had been taken from their bank account. Others said their membership had been incorrectly cancelled and they could no longer login. They feared benefits such as their professional indemnity insurance was no longer valid.
“The data was really poor. We went back to the previous CRM system to try and make sense of it and set up manual workarounds to solve problems for hundreds of members. Our fantastic accounts team set up a completely separate arrears system. Clearly, we engaged with our CRM supplier too, but that wasn’t moving us forward sufficiently,” said Louise.
Some member’s problems related to the CRM system itself while others concerned its implementation. Louise documented “lessons learnt” while compensating some members for the various issues.
“We developed a spreadsheet to record complaints coming in. Soon, we’d segmented it into 26 category tabs. It was dire. The small team handling the problem met daily to progress numerous complaints,” said Louise.
This situation cost the BDA financially. Not just in administrative time, but also in member refunds, write-offs, and discounts.
“Cost aside, the CRM nightmare had become a red RAG strategic risk for the association. I reported on it in every board meeting,” said Louise.
The final straw came when the system auto-cancelled 10% of BDA members without instruction. At this point Louise knew they must replace the failing CRM entirely.
Shaping a “good fit” CRM system
Louise first wanted to find independent external IT expertise to help them select and implement a system suitable for membership associations.
“Small organisations can get overwhelmed with technology,” said Louise. “It’s hard to know what you do and don’t need when specifying a project, so we wanted a neutral party to help us translate and negotiate the technical barriers.”
After careful consideration, the BDA selected Equantiis, an independent business and technology consultancy, with significant experience in the membership and NFP sector.
Equantiis first helped the BDA run a robust tendering exercise, which resulted in engaging Bluelight to create the new CRM.
“While Bluelight scored the highest tender, they could demonstrate work with similarly sized membership associations, too. We also admired their collaborative approach and post-implementation support,” said Louise.
Bluelight had worked with BDA’s website company, Pixl8. This would prove critical when integrating the new CRM system to support members 24/7.
The BDA, the accounts team (TC Group), Equantiis, and Bluelight shaped the eventual project together. Involving BDA staff from the outset, Bluelight ran several workshops to understand their needs.
“The customer isn’t always right because the customer doesn’t always know! So, we welcomed Bluelight saying “no” to us when we suggested an unnecessary function. Working as a team, and using each other’s expertise, we scoped a “good fit” membership association CRM system that wasn’t over-engineered and had credibility in its usage by membership organisations,” said Louise.
Delivering to a hard deadline
While Bluelight developed BlueCRM as specified, the BDA had to continue using the dysfunctional system and manual workarounds. That contract ended in October 2023, so BlueCRM and the upgraded website integration had to be ready by then. No room for extra time at all.
“Bluelight was exceptionally good at keeping us to time,” said Louise. “Any problem became a shared problem for all parties to resolve quickly. This approach really bolstered trust in our partners.”
Bluelight presented the first draft CRM design in May. Louise and her colleagues were delighted.
“I just remember sitting there and saying: “Oh wow!” Our accounts team was so impressed. BlueCRM was going to automate so many tasks and achieve so much for us,” said Louise.
Bluelight launched the BDA’s specified CRM system by the first week of October, on budget and on time.
Equantiis perspective“The BDA BlueCRM project succeeded because it effectively embraced people, processes, and technology,” said Tanya Sewell, Senior Consultant at Equantiis.
“We were excited to be chosen to partner with the BDA on their transformation programme. Using our procurement framework, we helped the BDA select Bluelight, who proved they were able to meet the requirements, with a fit-for-purpose membership CRM solution. Careful screening meant the BDA had the right technology partner to work with.
Continuing our engagement with the BDA, we provided project management throughout the implementation. A ‘change’ programme like this needs lots of communication, planning, and risk management to be successful and, working closely with other third parties involved, we delivered on time and to budget.
Critical to the success of this programme was a shared vision, a high level of engagement with BDA subject matter experts, and visible support from the CEO and COO from the outset.
Another key success factor was that all third parties involved - Bluelight, Pixl8, Equantiis and accounting firm TC Group – formed a strong partnership and shared every challenge to help the BDA realise its vision.
We believe measurement is key in any change. It helps demonstrate how successful the change has been on an ongoing basis, and supports continuous improvement. We therefore worked with the BDA to identify benefits, aligned to their overall vision, before defining a set of measures that would enable success to be understood.
We were pleased to see both the BDA engaging with the Benefits Realisation process and the amazing results of everyone’s hard work.” |
“On the edge of greatness”
The BDA did something many organisations fail to do – five months after BlueCRM implementation they started to measure its effectiveness. A year on, the association presented further benefits to the Board.
“Having to build a new CRM system from scratch was a significant investment for the BDA. We therefore needed to understand its impact, not just internally, but on our members’ experience too,” said Louise.
The BDA established various metrics to demonstrate performance in a meaningful way.
Financial and operational efficiencies
Several metrics highlighted notable efficiencies for the BDA from using BlueCRM.
In five months, the value of discounts given in compensation fell from £700 per month to £152. Meanwhile, the accounts team manually raised just 74 invoices a month compared to 185. Bad debt as a percentage of turnover fell from 3.6% to 2.3%, and direct debit transaction failures (not due to payee failure) fell from an average of 57 to 5 per month.
“These significant efficiencies not only helped our financial performance they also improved staff engagement with the CRM system. Everyone is far more confident in our data now, shown by our trust score rising from 3/10 to 8/10,” said Louise.
Enhanced member experience
Two metrics demonstrate how BlueCRM has improved member experience - the reduced attrition rate and the reduction in queries and complaints.
In just five months, the attrition rate for BDA members fell from 11% to 8.5%. By January 2025 the attrition rate had reduced further to 3.34%. Coupled with this, the number of customer support emails fell from 500 to 50. That reduced administration time spent handling queries from 75 hours to 24 hours per month. By January 2025 this had reduced further to 12 hours.
“Members found the front-end of BlueCRM much easier to access,” said Louise. “They could change their payment method and join our specialist groups 24/7 without having to contact the office. This self-serve approach made our system more user-friendly while eliminating workload for us.”
No longer having an endless queue of queries to tackle, the BDA reinvested resource into a new Membership Engagement Officer role. This individual works with the Membership Manager and focuses on getting the most out of BlueCRM.
For Louise, the reduction in organisation risk sums up the benefit of investing in BlueCRM.
“We now have a single source of truth that we trust. It also reduces our risk exposure to data privacy, trade union legislative compliance, and key single person dependency. Our CRM has gone from being the biggest red RAG risk on the register for two years to a green RAG rating. Thanks to our team’s hard work and some fantastic partnerships, including Bluelight, that’s a massive achievement,” said Louise.
Going forward with a CRM roadmap
With ongoing support from Bluelight, the BDA now has a roadmap to steer future CRM developments and derive further benefits from the system.
“Membership engagement scoring and personalisation are the two next big things,” said Louise. “Bluelight has already introduced (at our request) a new feature to map our members against political constituencies. This will help our vital campaigning activity as we’ll know which members live in constituencies across the four nations.
We’ll also be reviewing our member categories soon. Making better use of member tags, we want to gain deeper insight that can help increase recruitment and retention, working towards our strategic goal of 20,000 satisfied members by 2034. We also intend to measure our engagement with members and provide an improved value proposition for all member benefits.”
As for Bluelight, Louise feels she’s found a long-term digitalisation partner to help the BDA realise its potential.
“Everyone at Bluelight works to a fantastic standard and knows how to get the best out of us. With great personal qualities and a strong will for you to succeed, we’re confident we can trust them with our future data challenges,” said Louise.
How can we help you?
Fill in the form below and we will contact you.