Our Approach

The not-for-profit sector uses fundraising and membership management software designed to flex and
grow with individual needs.

With the sector’s growing maturity and complexity, the costs associated with this model are becoming
disproportionate. For some users, before very long they could spiral out of control.

It’s time to adopt a collaborative best practice approach that objectively and clearly identifies the sector’s common needs and addresses them effectively while reducing cost of ownership.

By working together to build an understanding of requirements that goes deeper than anything attempted before in the sector, we can help you deepen your relationship with donors and direct more funds towards the strategic voluntary goals you exist to support.

Background – the road to collaboration

As leading organisations in the NFP sector, you face huge challenges in managing stakeholder relationships and improving the efficiency and accountability of the services you provide.

To help you meet those challenges you demanded affordable and flexible software and, as the market matured, you requested more functionality and flexibility to give you an increasingly holistic view of your stakeholders. Westwood Forster’s Alms package addressed these needs.

The model we’ve always used has been to implement the system, then identify discrepancies between your processes and the way the software works, and then work around those discrepancies by adding flexibility to the software.

This focus on flexibility led to some groundbreaking thinking and breakthrough ideas like DataMaster and ViewMaster in our Alms products, enabling you to do things like adding your own data fields and screens. But ultimately it did little to improve in-depth understanding of your real needs and eventually the cracks started to appear.

As the flexibility of any software increases so does its complexity and with greater complexity comes the need for more expertise. Crucially, this expertise focuses on the software rather than the business it serves. So your costs climb because you need to employ business analysts to figure out what you really want to achieve and then to communicate this so the software can be developed accordingly.

Attrition in this business analyst role is high, which means that the in-depth understanding of each system is frequently lost – and with it goes valuable information about supporters.

Also, because each system is effectively bespoke, it’s you who bears responsibility for integrating the software with your business processes, and for reporting and analysis.

The result is a complex system, an over-reliance on the ‘super users’ capable of making sense of it, and expensive support.

Wouldn’t it be better to have software that properly understands what you do and provides the information you want without any fuss? It should also be a pleasure to use and it should make you more productive so you can serve your supporters better.

New best practice model

Building on 20 years’ experience of working with some of the NFP sector’s leading organisations, the latest version of Westwood Forster’s software – alms.NET – is the result of a radical new approach.

In close partnership with key players in the sector, we’ve spent many thousands of hours analysing real-world requirements and the business processes that underpin them. To ensure consistency and objectivity in this analysis, we adopted a best practice approach that involves asking basic questions about why things are done the way they are and whether there might be more effective ways of doing them.

Following a long cycle of collaborative workshops, reviews and product redesign with these development partners, a new iterative problem-solving model has been developed. alms.NET enables you to adopt best practice methods quickly and effectively for each business process. It automatically provides intelligence to the right people and does away with the need for technical expertise that used to be required for reports, analysis and decision support.

As a result the cost of processing data, maintaining the database and providing training and business support has fallen dramatically, making it possible to redirect significant sums of money towards the strategic voluntary goals that everyone in the sector exists to serve.

We’re in this together

At Westwood Forster, we’re confident that adopting this new model based on sector best practice will result in a product that works better for everyone. In fact we’re so confident that we won’t charge you if alms.NET fails to deliver significant savings.

We understand the vital importance of clear and honest communication as we make this change together. We know that if we’re not careful it may seem as though we’re saying to you – our clients – that we’re no longer prepared to accommodate your requirements and that from now on you’re just going to have to fit in with us.

But that’s not it. What we’re really aiming for is a truly objective analysis of requirements from everyone, regardless of size or resources. By building a collaborative relationship, together we will arrive at a deeper understanding of this specialist market and a product that’s as easy to use as it is effective at solving your problems. Let’s see what we can do for you.