ECLEVA Customer Testimonials: Baptist World Aid (Full Video)

Baptist World Aid Australia is a Not-for-Profit Christian organisation, committed to empowering the world’s poor to lift themselves out of poverty. 

John Hickey (CEO of Baptist World Aid): Baptist World Aid Australia is a community development organisation. Our focus is working with communities and people around the world to empower them to lift out of poverty sustainably. 

Jane Alfred (Director of Innovation and Change, Baptist World Aid): We actually started by volunteers. So after World War 2 they provided disaster relief to refugees and now we work in 80 different projects across 20 countries and we support about 10,000 child partners in our Child Sponsorship Program. 

John Hickey (CEO of Baptist World Aid): As a charitable organisation, often organisations like us could be considered to be living hand to mouth. We’ve always said we’ve got to create capacity in ourselves so that we can have more impact. 

Technology is a huge enabler of change. It’s vital and even in the developing parts of the world today, access to technology has expanded massively. So we can use technology to really leverage even further the impact that we have in so many different ways. 

Jane Alfred (Director of Innovation and Change, Baptist World Aid): We’ve been working with ECLEVA on our Digital Transformation journey for about the last 5 years for large and small scale projects. 

The technology helps us to create a better connection with our supporters and a better experience to help engage with our work to comply with things like privacy and ensure that the children’s information is held securely, helping us to streamline manual processes and create efficiencies. So then with the time saving we can look to create greater impact in the work that we do. 

John Hickey (CEO of Baptist World Aid): ECLEVA has been an enormous facilitator for us. They bore the willingness to understand the practice and the mission of our organisation being able to look at the way and scape of an organisation such as ours and be able to pick what we need to think about to be better in what we do and they’ve done a wonderful job. 

Jane Alfred (Director of Innovation and Change, Baptist World Aid): So I think the real value that ECLEVA bring outside of their expertise in Microsoft products is, it’s not just about delivering an IT system, they really get to know who we are and what we are trying to achieve as an organisation and also understand the complexities of the nonprofit sector. 

I’d recommend ECLEVA because it feels like a true partnership, it’s not just about delivering an IT system but really helping us to use technology to enable us to achieve our goals. 

John Hickey (CEO of Baptist World Aid): Once you’ve invested in technology, the cost of that investment pay itself back many fold. And if you think in normal business terms, you talk about return on investment. We would say return for impact. We’re able to limit our own internal costs and therefore we can maximise more in terms of what we invest for impact so that we can keep doing things better and better. 

Having a solid technology base has given us many times the return of what we have invested so far. But it takes the confidence and the faith to be able to say yes, I need to invest in this. And our experience with ECLEVA is very much that it has been worth it and therefore we would definitely recommend them to other agencies and I know we have in the past.