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In The Netherlands we have a strange, almost hybrid type of company called 'woningcorporatie', translated housing corporation. History in a nutshell to as a background against their needs:

Most of them originate from the period just after the Second World War when loads of houses needed to be built. Up to the 1990's these corporations were focused on building houses for the bottom of the social scale. The government decided the rules and what needed to be done and the housing corporations did the work. In 1995 the government cut the cord and the housing corporations were more or less on their own although there is still a connection with national and local government. Since then some of these housing corporations focus more on people rather than houses, and try to work together with other social institutions and companies.

The systems they are using are still largely focusing on houses and tenants, rather than households and individuals. So in general they do not really have any kind of CRM system. We, EE-atWork (http://www.ee-atwork.nl support housing corporations in focusing on customers, individuals and the outside world rather than procedures. And we have recently discovered CiviCRM. We are developing a template configuration for housing corporations, and are trying to convince them what a wonderful solution that is.

Now we have found a housing corporation ( about 100 employees) in The Netherlands that will start a project with CiviCRM. They have a specific system that handle all their rental and property transactions, but lack a lot of customer information and a central spot. They have been investigating some CRM solutions, but found it hard to see if that would help. They see the danger of getting in negotiations with suppliers and installing solution without a real feel of what problems they want to solve.

We are going to select 10 testcases with them, configure CiviCRM and build an interface with their main system. A group of users will then test CiviCRM for a period of 2 months. After that time we will focus on the 3 main processes where they think they can add most value in the shortest time, and decide if they want to use CiviCRM as their favourite CRM instrument for those processes. We are going to start this project in May, and we hope we will start a full implementation in September. 

We will keep you all posted on our progress! And I am sure some of you will help us on our way with answers to the questions we will undoubtedly post here on the forums......

Erik