“YOUR SOLUTION IS VERY EASY TO USE, EVERYTHING IS CENTRALISED AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE TOOL AND THE BACK-OFFICE ARE ACCESSIBLE. THERE IS NO NEED TO HAVE STUDIED WEBMASTERING. THE INTERFACE IS CLEAR AND PLEASANT TO USE.
Alix Dieudonné, Sourcing Manager at Fidesco.
Alix Dieudonné is in charge of sourcing. Her mission is to take care of the alumni network and to make Fidesco known to youth organisations and Catholic organisations in France. Former volunteers are regularly asked to come to events to share their testimony.
Can you introduce Fidesco?
Fidesco is a Catholic NGO for international solidarity created in 1981. We send volunteers abroad for local work missions with the poorest people. The missions are suitable for all types of profiles: single, couple with child(ren), childless, young retiree… and cover all fields: agriculture, health, social, teaching, project management… They generally last two years so that the volunteers can establish relationships of trust, break the language barrier and be able to put themselves at the service of the most disadvantaged with ever greater humility. We give volunteers the opportunity to put their professional and human skills to work in the mission. We then take the time to assign the missions to the volunteers in a personalised manner according to their profile and skills. At Fidesco, you do not choose your mission, you receive it with the availability of your heart.
Why did you set up an alumni network?
Each year, we send about 100 volunteers on mission. Today we have just over 2,000 former volunteers. These are people who have lived and shared an incredible experience for two years. Once they return to France, the mission does not stop there… It continues! After two years of mission, many volunteers remain committed and want to give back what they have received.
With this platform, we want to unite former volunteers, allow them to meet, stay in touch, help each other (materially, professionally and humanely), and above all maintain this family spirit. They can now easily share their post-mission experiences, join the group of their country of mission, or group of French region to meet physically, and welcome the new former volunteers each year.
Why did you choose Netanswer?
We were looking for a solution for the Fidesco alumni network. We therefore carried out a benchmark of several players to see which solution would be the most suitable and the one that would best meet our needs. Fabrice Wilthien’s demonstration was simple and very clear, I immediately felt the transparency and cohesion of your team.
The proposal and modules proposed by Netanswer could meet all our needs and could be easily implemented.
In your opinion what are the biggest assets of our solution?
The first strength is the management of our alumni database. Before using Netanswer, we had an excel file that we updated manually using answers to a google form sent to the alumni… Quite a complicated job, therefore, which was very time-consuming. The Netanswer solution allows us to have a reliable and enriched database thanks to the members who can update their own data. This is a real bonus. We can now export easily with many filters available. It’s a huge time saver for us!
And your solution is now available to all members.
Moreover, your solution allows us to have a global vision on the alumni network, everything is centralised in one tool (emails, events, news…). Alumni will be able to publish and receive job offers, join groups by country or region, comment and share news, classifieds… thus becoming real actors of the platform.
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How did the project go?
We were very well supported in the realisation of this project. There was a nice transition between Fabrice, whom I had during the presentation, and Chloe, who followed us throughout the project. Chloé was always available to answer all our questions and also accompanied us on the use of internal tools at Netanswer such as Redmine.
The deadlines were very tight.
The deadlines were quite good, we had regular meetings and progress points, only the delivery of the site was a week late. Overall, I felt a real presence, availability of the teams and also a personalization.
We had a great experience with the project.
We had many hours of training to get used to the tool. We would have liked to have had more, as there are so many things to discover on your platform. The first 3-hour training session allowed us to survey all the global functionalities of the site. From the second session onwards, we were able to ask Chloe all our questions which allowed us to discover and understand more. It was very enjoyable.
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In your opinion what are the advantages/disadvantages of our solution?
Your solution is very easy to use, everything is centralised and the ownership of the tool and the back office are accessible. There is no need to have studied webmastering and this was a very important point for us. The interface is clear and pleasant to use. In particular, we were able to redesign the tree structure of our website to customise the menu to our needs.
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We would have liked to be able to customise the wording of the button to share a news item and adapt it for each category and to be able to save customised title styles for the creation of our news items… These are undoubtedly developments that Netanswer will offer later.
What are your goals/expectations on using your new platform?
At Fidesco, in the process of recruiting a candidate, there are training sessions that require a lot of administrative logistics: sign-in sheets, badges… Netanswer will allow us to manage these logistics of our events through the tool. It will be a great time saver. We have a possible longer term project with Netanswer: to be able to release the mobile app dedicated to the alumni network. Yes! I could recommend your solution to other associations!
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