What the engagement delivered, in numbers.
Of volunteers a year and hundreds of local groups, with no shared record of who they are or what they have been told.
Spreadsheet entries a year typed up by 22 officers, then re-shaped by hand for seven or eight funders every quarter.
Shared data model and award engine, so a school, site or contact is recorded once and used by every programme.
The most at-risk programme moved ahead of its external deadline, with a new early-years programme in the same launch.
A capable organisation on disconnected tools.
Contact data in Excel, split by locality and duplicated across teams. No common way to identify a school, site or organisation across programmes, so the same school appeared in every system with no shared reference. Officers capturing data in the field, then re-keying it at a desk. Award systems at end of life and at risk, with hard external deadlines against them.
What this shows
The decisive question was whether to build the shared foundation first or assemble the system programme by programme and retrofit the joins.
Discovery that listens to every team finds the one architectural point that matters, here a shared identity for every school, site and contact, and the business risks that should drive the order of work.
A not-for-profit, relationship-led organisation needs a system built around relationships and outcomes, not a sales pipeline.
“We knew our data was in too many places; what we didn’t have was anyone telling us which problem to fix first. The discovery listened to every team and came back with one answer, one record for every school, site and person and a single way of running an award, and a sequence that dealt with the programme at most risk before its deadline.”
Director
Talk to us about your organisation.
Tell us where your organisation is starting from.