Building the foundation for a future-ready CRM and web landscape
The challenge
Friluftsfrämjandet’s CRM and web landscape had become costly, complex and difficult to govern. With significant business logic embedded in the web solution, responsibilities were unclear and the setup was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and maintain.
The solution
Sofigate partnered with Friluftsfrämjandet to map needs across member management, activity management, education, workflows, and technical and security requirements. Together, we created around 300 requirements, conducted a market scan, and ran parallel RFI and RFP processes for CRM and web solutions.
The outcome
The collaboration gave Friluftsfrämjandet a structured, fact-based basis for selecting future-fit CRM and web partners. Suppliers were evaluated consistently against business-critical requirements, helping the organisation move towards a more manageable, clearly governed and sustainable platform landscape.
Friluftsfrämjandet is one of Sweden’s largest outdoor organisations, with around 140,000 members and a nationwide network of local branches. As a democratic, non-profit organisation, its activities are largely organised locally by thousands of volunteer leaders, supported by regional and national structures. This creates a diverse digital environment that needs to serve members, volunteers and the organisation itself reliably and efficiently.
As its existing CRM and web landscape became increasingly complex and costly to maintain, Friluftsfrämjandet recognised that a more sustainable foundation was needed for the future.
Introduction
Friluftsfrämjandet turned to Sofigate to create clarity and identify future-fit solutions on the market. Through close collaboration, Sofigate helped the organisation translate its needs into approximately 300 requirements, assess a broad supplier landscape, and establish a structured basis for choosing CRM and web solutions that could support long-term sustainability.
The Story of Friluftsfrämjandet
With members and activities across Sweden, Friluftsfrämjandet relies on digital services to manage memberships, activities and education across its nationwide organisation. These services need to accommodate a complex set of stakeholders, workflows and security requirements while remaining manageable over time.
When Friluftsfrämjandet approached Sofigate, the organisation’s current CRM and web solutions had become expensive to support and maintain. The landscape was also technically complex. Much of the logic sat in the web layer, making it difficult to establish clear areas of responsibility between systems, suppliers and internal teams. The organisation needed to understand what a sustainable future setup could look like, and which suppliers on the market could realistically meet its specific requirements.
The goal was not simply to replace technology. It was to create a manageable, long-term foundation for Friluftsfrämjandet’s future digital capabilities and to base vendor decisions on a thorough understanding of the organisation’s actual needs.
“We cannot continue as we are today. It is not sustainable for us; we need to change something.”
Peo Knutson, CFO at Friluftsfrämjandet
The why and the how
The vendor evaluation built on an earlier prestudy, which had already created trust and a shared understanding of Friluftsfrämjandet’s future vision. This gave the organisation confidence in Sofigate’s ability to provide structured evaluation material, high-quality analysis and expert advice throughout the process.
The collaboration began with a detailed assesment of how Friluftsfrämjandet operates today. Together with key stakeholders, Sofigate mapped workflows, responsibilities, technical and security considerations, and requirements across membership, activities and education. In parallel, Sofigate carried out a market analysis to identify relevant CRM and web suppliers. This included global, large-scale suppliers; local providers with a strong understanding of the Swedish market; and mid-sized alternatives that could bring different perspectives and levels of flexibility.
To move from broad market understanding to evidence-based comparison, Sofigate and Friluftsfrämjandet established a list of approximately 300 requirements. A Request for information (RFI) was sent to a broad group of suppliers to understand market coverage and capability fit. After the first evaluation round, detailed detailed requests for proposals (RFPs) were sent to the remaining CRM and web suppliers, with the two processes running in parallel. This enabled like-for-like comparisons and a clearer view of which suppliers best matched Friluftsfrämjandet’s overall needs.
Throughout the process, the focus was on collaboration and transparency. Sofigate contributed structure, evaluation material and expert advisory, while Friluftsfrämjandet’s stakeholders ensured that decisions were grounded in the organisation’s realities and future vision.
“Working with Sofigate gave us the confidence and reassurance to move the project forward. We felt that they always had our best interests at heart and helped us turn plans into action.”
Sofia Melander, CRM Business Owner
The results
The collaboration gave Friluftsfrämjandet a clear and comparable understanding of the CRM and web supplier landscape. Instead of evaluating suppliers based on general capabilities alone, the organisation could assess them against a structured requirements set built around its own workflows, responsibilities, security needs and long-term ambitions.
A key result was the creation of a robust evaluation foundation: approximately 300 agreed requirements, a broad RFI covering different types of suppliers, and detailed RFP material for shortlisted CRM and web vendors. This gave Friluftsfrämjandet stronger control over the vendor selection process and a clearer view of which solutions could support the organisation sustainably.
The work also helped reduce ambiguity in the future setup. By identifying where capabilities should sit and what each solution needed to support, Friluftsfrämjandet gained a clearer basis for defining areas of responsibility between systems, suppliers and internal teams.
While final business impact will depend on the subsequent implementation and vendor decisions, the project created immediate value by turning an unsustainable and complex starting point into a structured, transparent and decision-ready path forward.
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