How Kinabase enabled Home-Start Cambridgeshire to cut costs and simplify systems

About Home-Start Cambridgeshire:

Home-Start Cambridgeshire is a registered UK charity with the aim to give every child the best possible start in life. Home-Start Cambridgeshire describes its mission as “one parent helping another parent through a difficult time.”

The charity offers a variety of services to families, including weekly volunteer home visits to deal with diverse concerns such as parental mental health issues, isolation, postnatal illness, disability, bereavement, multiple births, and parenting skills.

The Problem:

Home-Start Cambridgeshire has been very reliant on paper data entry and physical filing cabinets in their daily operations. They wanted to find a software that would eliminate the use of paper and streamline their data processes - allowing them to focus on helping families, what really matters.

Jonathan Jelley said about their attempts to find a good database management platform, “All of this effort was to try and stop our reliance on paper systems and metal filing cabinets… the entire workflow of the charity was essentially on paper, with all the inefficiency and overhead that has.”

With several aborted attempts at deploying a digital CRM, Home-Start were initially anxious about yet another attempt with a completely new provider.

Why Kinabase?

When we asked why Home-Start Cambridgeshire chose Kinabase as their ideal software solution, they said the following:

“The initial engagement with Jason and the team was so encouraging. We never for a moment thought they were thinking about themselves but were solely focused on understanding our needs and ensuring that they had the solutions to meet them.

We were amazed that within the first few minutes of a product demo, we were already seeing how the system was so easy to use and would indeed meet our needs.”

- Jonathan Jelley MBE JP

One of the beauties of Kinabase is that it indeed can be configured to a myriad of business problems. Managing the charitable operations at Home-Start Cambridgeshire is no exception.

Home-Start Cambridgeshire shared that the flexible configurations Kinabase offered stood out from other software solutions. They enjoyed how easy it was to use and the ability to tailor the software to their own requirements, and use their own language, terminology, and workflow. Kinabase quickly became a key component of Home-Start Cambridgeshire’s operations. They were able to immediately stop relying on paper and spreadsheets, and now they want to start utilising Kinabase in other areas of their business like events and fundraising management, too.

How has Kinabase helped you save time and money?

In short, Jelley stated that Kinabase has become “the trusted operational engine of our charity, making us more efficient and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements as well as saving money.”

Our hope at Kinabase is that our software products will truly solve your business needs and change your organisation for the better. We were happy to learn that Kinabase was a key factor in helping Home-Start Cambridgeshire go “paperless,” spend less time on administrative tasks, and increase process efficiency. This will enable them to focus more on their social mission and make an even greater impact on families around Cambridgeshire.

We were pleased to hear that Kinabase helped Home-Start Cambridgeshire save money, too. Because of Kinabase, they didn’t have to fill a vacancy in their team for a job that would have been dedicated to database development and data entry, proving to be a significant cost saving.

Jelley also added, “…we are now not reliant on paper. We are now more efficient in our work which is prompting us to consider what other processes we can move to Kinabase… We spend less time on administration because the process of inputting and managing our data is now so efficient… It is quickly moving from being our CRM system to an ERM [enterprise risk management] system! This will enable us to focus on how we grow to make even bigger impacts and help more families through our work.”