It’s fair to say that 2021 was a big year for Compuco. We’ve gone through big changes in our brand, we’ve been joined by a number of great new colleagues and we’ve put a lot of work in across some exciting projects you’ll be seeing more of next year. With all of our teams working hard to do the best for our clients and deliver new functionality, we wanted to take the chance to reflect on 2021 and everything that’s happened.
The most obvious starting place, even if we’re skipping a bit to the end of the year. Until very recently you might have known us better as Compucorp - a name we had used since our founding all the way back in 1977. This was a big change and reflects our desire to align our modern mission with the way we present and talk about ourselves. Our CEO, Jamie, wrote more about the rebrand if you’d like to read more.
Alongside the new brand came the new website, which you’re on at this very moment! As a digital agency, we felt it was time to refresh our own site and we’ve been very happy with the positive response we’ve received from both our clients and our wider audience alike. With the fundamentals of a clear new brand in place, this opens us up to many exciting new projects in 2022.
CiviCRM is one of the products we’ve worked with most frequently over the years and it’s been a big year on that front. We just released the latest iteration of our Membership Extras Extension, which vastly improves the payment options available for managing membership organisations. This has been something we’ve been hard at work on all year and are glad to be able to share the significant progress we have made with the community.
Another new feature we’re particularly proud of is our certificate functionality, which lets you auto-generate personalised certificates for various CiviCRM entities such as Cases, Memberships and Events which can even be downloaded by users independently via our self service portal. This is a great time saver for organisations, letting them tie in certificates more closely with their CRM processes and removing often manual steps to generate these documents.
What does 2022 have in store from us for Civi? You might have seen our post on the community about a Yoti integration, but we also have much bigger plans afoot we will be sharing in due course...
While it might be our bread and butter, Civi is by far from the only platform we work with. In fact, this year saw big developments in our community platform team. If you’re unfamiliar with these platforms, we recently wrote over on MemberWise about why they’re such a good investment. This year saw the deepening of our partnership with Open Social, with the release of a new integration with CiviCRM alongside integrations between Open Social and Salesforce and Dynamics.
We’ve also done a lot of work on our feature-rich self service portal, which we often implement alongside CiviCRM for our clients. This has seen significant improvements with a new UI that allows users to modify theming, meaning custom colours, spacing and tools to personalise its appearance. Alongside this we’ve added new public directory functionality, useful for organisations who want a searchable list of their members to be available outside of their CRM.
This year has been a big one for our many wonderful clients. However, 2020 undoubtedly proved a very difficult year for many in the non-profit sector, with traditional revenue sources and processes often disrupted. One highly notable trend was the almost 30% gap between orgs with low and high digital maturity in achieving their goals.
Both coming into and throughout 2021 clients new and old have been keen to embark on ambitious digital transformation projects. Among clients who were already using CiviCRM by the start of the pandemic, we heard many reports of their CRM having been absolutely critical to their organisational survival and success during this period; allowing pertinent communications to be easily distributed to members and events to be seamlessly transitioned online.
We recently announced our upcoming work with The Society of Authors and we’ve also added some new client stories to our project gallery. Keep your eyes peeled on our social channels as we aim to start sharing more about how digital transformation enables our clients to achieve some truly spectacular social impacts.
Of course, it would be entirely remiss of us to forget to talk about the exciting changes we’ve had internally this year. We strongly believe our team members are our biggest asset and this is something we’ve been reflecting on a lot this year.
We have kicked off several new initiatives across the organisation and reviewed major internal policies with the aim of continually improving working life for our team.
One of the most popular initiatives has been the ‘random coffee’ rota which has connected staff from all teams in the company and all corners of the globe, opening up one-on-one conversations between people who may otherwise rarely interact day to day.
We’ve also implemented several key new benefits, one of which is paid volunteering leave, allowing our team dedicated time to contribute back to organisations and causes they personally feel passionate about. You can read more about how this works in the first of our new Compuco culture blog series.
A final big change in this area is that we now, for the first time, have dedicated business development and marketing departments. Given our history, it might surprise some that it has taken until now, but this gives us the ability to better serve potential and existing clients, more frequently share tailored content and provide more insight into the impressive work our technical teams are doing behind the scenes.
2021 has been a year of a lot of change and a lot of hard work has been put in to make that possible. As we go into our first full year as Compuco, we are excited about the position we’re in and all the great things we have to bring to you next year. Until then, thanks for your continued support and if you have any questions you can always get in touch!
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