Case study: C.A.S.T and In-Contact

In-Contact is a technology solution provider specialising in nonprofit organisations, offering tailored systems that enhance operational efficiency, donor management, and program tracking. Initially developed for LIV Village, In-Contact has grown into a robust platform that supports nonprofits in streamlining their activities while ensuring accountability and impact measurement.

Church Alliance for Social Transformation (CAST), a long-established nonprofit organisation in KwaZulu-Natal, partners with local churches to drive social change. With nearly 20 locations, CAST runs a variety of programs, including food relief, youth development, business training, and leadership initiatives. The organisation needed a centralised system to track its diverse activities, monitor program impact across different demographics, and manage donor contributions efficiently. To meet these needs, CAST sought a cost-effective and adaptable solution that would not only provide real-time data insights but also support ongoing customisation.

This case study explores how In-Contact addressed CAST’s operational challenges by implementing a flexible and scalable system, ultimately enhancing the organisation's ability to serve communities effectively.

System Needs

CAST (Church Alliance for Social Transformation) needed a system to record all the activities across nearly 20 locations. For relief programs included food parcel, clothing distribution, home based care buckets, emergency relief and health screening. For youth development they provided soccer activities for different age groups. For adults they had a series of business training modules and mentorship, not to forget farming, standard of living tracking and leadership training.  

The tracking needed to provide them with a statistics breakdown of all the activities they were doing across age groups, gender, language, nationalities, disabilities and race. This was to be used to monitor impact of programmes, provide accountability to potential donors and for their monthly and annual reporting.

Finally they needed a donor management system to record donations, issue thanks from templates, create tax certificates easily and send thank you letters.

Solutions provided:

In-Contact met with CAST in 2018 and gathered their needs. They progressively implemented a custom solution, instead of a box-drop, and did the data take-on at no cost to the client. In-Contact avoids upfront fees and rather factors their costs into the number of users charged for, which typically balances out to the number of users that need to use the system. They also do not charge for ongoing enhancements, and support is local and direct with the developers.

In-Contact avoids upfront fees and rather factors their costs into the number of users charged for

This proved to be a decisive factor for CAST, since they had received a quote of R200 000 to implement a popular international solution, and in factoring the costs over a few years they were able to ensure free support and tweaking of the system to meet their ongoing needs and feature requirements. They found that as the system was implemented they were able to get a better perspective on these requirements too.

A mobile app had already been developed to record contact data. The app already worked offline, and was able to synchronize the data back to the server once in wifi range. It also had to enable them to see all the data for a recipient and not just a limited set. For their requirements, the app had to be enhanced to also allow the capturing of attendance registers.

The implementation was a challenge because of changing the way staff thought and the challenge of ensuring everyone was recording their data. To this end, a central calendar was seen to provide more control and weekly management reports were scrutinised to monitor activity in the field.

The messaging and donation modules had also already been implemented at other clients, so this was easily fulfilled, with thank you letters and tax certificates stylised to their preference.

The constant support – any day or hour – has been much appreciated.

As the years have passed CAST has changed strategy, gone through major staff changes, rationalised programs and become more focused in passing skills onto their partner communities rather than running programs themselves. This has resulted in a leaner organisation with capacity for much further reach. In-Contact has been able to adapt with these changes.

Client comments:

CAST started working with In-Contact in 2017. Since day one Iris has constantly modelled the system around our specific needs. This has meant it has met our specific needs in our specific setting. What this has also meant is there are regular changes, updates and adaptions which Iris has speedily and professionally adapted.  The constant support – any day or hour – has been much appreciated. Highly recommend In-Contact system.