Client: A media sector charity supporting worldwide beneficiaries

Problem: In a small organisation where everyone has to be flexible about their roles, it’s easy to get bogged down in daily operations and not devote enough time to strategy and growth. When everyone designs and uses their own contact and performance management systems (databases and spreadsheets), it’s impossible to see how well the organisation is doing as a whole, and there is inevitably lots of duplication in marketing activity. The Trust needed to refocus on strategy and fundraising, plus improve its internal processes.

Approach:

Ian Seath provided support in three areas:

• A review of business processes and analysis of how everyone in the team was spending their time
• A re-design of roles and responsibilities to enable the Director to focus her time on Fund-raising and Strategy
• Implementation of a CRM system with performance metrics and reporting

The organisation’s key business processes were defined and broken down into key activities. Staff were asked to identify how their time was spent against each of these activities. The analysis revealed a mismatch between what the Director felt was needed and how the team actually spent its time. Several options were developed for restructuring roles and workloads; these were presented to the Trustees and a preferred option was selected. The analysis of processes also highlighted the need for a single CRM system (to replace four separate databases), with integrated performance reporting. A cloud-based CRM solution was implemented and has been tailored to the Trust’s requirements, enabling them to eliminate data duplication and to create timely and accurate performance reports.

Benefits:

• By understanding where everyone spent their time, it became clear that the Director was over-loaded with operational matters that could be better dealt with by other team members
• Freeing-up the Director’s time and re-structuring everyone’s roles and responsibilities has enabled the Trust to focus its efforts more effectively on fund-raising
• The new CRM system has provided an effective way to manage relationships with donors and beneficiaries and provides up-to-the-minute performance reports on fundraising

Contact: Ian Seath