Case Study: Pay and Employment Rights Service (PERS) centralises disparate databases and unlocks subscription revenue with CiviCRM

Integrating disparate databases, and a new website to facilitate income generation

PERS (Pay and Employment Rights Service) needed to move from grant-limited, fragmented service delivery to a sustainable paid subscription model and to consolidate around 12 disparate MS Access/Excel databases — comprising tens of thousands of records — into a single, staff-accessible system that integrated with a new website. They chose CiviCRM (deployed within a Joomla 2.5 site) to support telephone advice tracking, subscription management, event booking, document access controls, funder reporting, conflict-of-interest checks, and recording civic boundaries for funded services.

CiviCRM was implemented using core modules (phone-call/activity tracking, CiviEvent, CiviMember, Relationships) plus custom data-cleaning scripts, a postcode lookup integration for wards/districts, and a JDownloads-based document library tied into the CRM. The result was a single CiviCRM database consolidating the previous disparate sources, enabling online paid subscriptions and event booking, accurate helpline activity tracking, clearer conflict-of-interest checks, and automated reporting for funders — delivering the operational control PERS needed to generate income and manage services centrally.

PERS