ACS

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of Common Goal, an athletic nonprofit organization. It’s more of a movement about professional football players, managers, and football clubs pledging a minimum of 1% of their salaries towards supporting social projects all around the world. In the U.S., it would be soccer. 

Technology and tech development play a big part in supporting the transactions around the 1% pledge donation and for stewarding the relationships with the nonprofit organizations that we serve. We are a major charity that is growing this movement of athletes supporting charitable organizations.

What challenge were you trying to address with ACS?

We were looking for a partner that would be able to build a custom website that also supports the transaction process and enables smooth integration with our CRM system. The purpose is to make sure our content and project management system can be easily managed through the CRM. The system we are using is Podio.

The task of ACS  was to ensure that the backend process had an optimized integration with how we’re operating as an organization which involves content management and the CRM system we already had in place.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team developed our website that is basically supporting this movement, serving as a digital home for it. The purpose of our website is to inform and inspire people about what we’re doing and what our organization is, as well as to tell stories. In the end, it’s also about facilitating transactions of the donation.

ACS is an ongoing partner of ours— it’s not a one-off project that is already concluded. We’re constantly developing the tech capabilities of our website and CRM further with them. They are our lead tech partner.

What is the team composition?

Our company only has one main point of contact. We have worked with two of the founders and they have their team of software developers, but I’m not sure how many have been involved in creating our solution.

How did you come to work with ACS?

ACS approached me and suggested that I engage with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent about €100,000—€150,000 (approximately  $117,000 – $170,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2018 and we continue to work with them in our projects.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Their work has been very positive. With the actual tech development and programming, ACS is a partner that delivers high-quality outputs. They have a deep understanding of what we’re looking to achieve as a company.

Above all, they are able to use their skills and competence in the area of software development, frontend design, and conceptualization. It’s been an overall good experience.

How did ACS perform from a project management standpoint?

The communication has been great in terms of their reliability, their level of responsiveness, and their level of transparency when it comes to actual costs. ACS also has a very good process in terms of account management and communication. 

We communicate through regular video chats. Once a year, we have an in-person meeting since we’re not in the same country. They’re based in the UK and we’re based in Germany. We communicate via email as well. ACS’ time management has been good but not excellent. There have been cases where deadlines had to be extended. But we know that’s also part of the nature of software development. Overall, they’re a very trustworthy partner.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There’s a high level of trust between our company and ACS. We always know they’re capable of delivering the highest standard of tech development. We have a very thoughtful engagement. They’re really making an effort to get to the bottom of our challenges. Further, they really go above and beyond in understanding and empathizing with our issues. It’s a very complementary skill set to what we have internally.

Are there any areas they could improve?

For us, it’s been a very positive experience. We just need to improve collaboration between our design teams and the person in charge of our company’s communications department. Moving forward, we need to ensure that there will be smooth communication between our internal team and their teams. We went through a couple of iterations and talks to figure out what the best process will be.

After that, ACS and our firm gained some learnings and also discussed our troubles with meeting the deadlines. In summary, we want to achieve process optimization, reduce the feedback loops, and establish more effective communication.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I highly recommend ACS. They are among the top people that I have worked with in my professional career in terms of tech companies. I can recommend them without any reservation especially if you’re looking for a long-term partner that can support you if you have scaling challenges and ambitions. Most importantly, they have a high level of competence in conceptualization as much as in the front- and backend development.