Making Dynamics work for the charity sector!

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Vision

As an international occupational charity, caba’s vision is that everyone in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) community can fully participate in life.

Purpose

caba helps the ICAEW community thrive by equipping individuals with the practical, emotional, or financial tools to manage whatever is in front of them, from everyday situations to exceptional life-changing circumstances. caba supports ACA students, existing or former ICAEW members and close family dependents both in the UK and internationally. Support is focused around five key health pillars –mental health, physical health, financial health, legal support, and career development. In 2020 caba had 443,088 meaningful interactions with the chartered accountant community in 47 countries and spent £3.8 million providing this advice and support.

THE CHALLENGE

Over the last decade, the community caba supports has diversified. The demographic of people accessing support has changed, and the needs of these individuals have shifted and become more varied. The way caba communicates with the community is more tailored and sophisticated, and engagement rates grow year after year.

Internally, caba has additional skillsets within the team, greater knowledge and insight, and access to more data. They also utilise different software and platforms to support marketing and service activity, and requirements in this area continue to grow.

Furthermore, the expectations of the community are now different – in the support they require, how they access this and when.

caba needed to respond to these demands to remain relevant and effective, and the IT investment needed to support these changing needs and any subsequent future strategies and aspirations.

Specifically, the challenge was to ensure that the digital transformation:

• Created a platform that enabled the provision of person-centric, contemporary, and accessible every day and exceptional support for the caba community, wherever they are in the world.
• Enabled caba to gain insight and customer feedback, ensuring that they were always relevant and could improve and respond to customer expectations.
• Facilitated a single view of all stakeholder and audience touchpoints – whether clients (in-house services or through co-created third-party suppliers), delegates, website users, or campaign interactions – through seamless integrations, ensuring that the user had full overview and control of their journey with caba.
• Delivered a simple and modern digital customer experience that automatically integrated all data sources and systems by having a central data repository for all customer data.
• Centralised as many processes in as few systems as possible and automated manual processes to reduce wasted staff resources by better integration of systems and customer self-service.
• Improved and enhanced the data caba held on their supporters and beneficiaries alike– ensuring quality and accuracy whilst facilitating the provision of tailored communications to ensure they can communicate with the greatest impact.
• Allowed caba to be nimble, to be able to improve and enhance, be responsive to change and to have better self-awareness by being able to have a live and interactive view of key measures of impact.

Finally, and importantly, caba wanted to find a supplier whom they could trust and build a long-term successful relationship with.

caba worked closely with HartSquare, a well-known consultancy in the NFP space, to ensure their choice of supplier was validated by this consultancy’s experience in the sector.

THE APPROACH

As with all Bluelight projects, it was critical to assess user requirements through a well-structured and well-attending joint Discovery program. Here Bluelight’s personnel ensured they understood to a high level of detail how the existing CRM solution worked and where caba’s aspirations of success were placed, matching these with the best way of delivering them into BlueCRM/Dynamics.

Bluelight’s expertise in teasing out requirements with challenging and constructive questions and then putting together an accountable and realistic project schedule meant that caba could sign off on this stage confident that the boundaries for the project in terms of cost, timeline, scope and quality would not be breached.

As implementation got underway, caba understood that internal processes needed to be tweaked and sharpened to embed the project demands into the organisation.  The approach aimed to meet two specific challenges head-on

1. User enthusiasm and engagement
2. Accommodating Project work alongside BAU

At each stage, caba worked with BLC to ensure users knew exactly what would be required of them and what the output would be from their engagement. They anticipated pitfalls and, therefore, how to work around them. Caba, for example, recognised there would be a knowledge gap for users to bridge from receiving the training to actively being able to engage with the new solution to test that all aspects of the business processes could be fully tested in UAT.

Testing can be overwhelming for users who are still embedded in the old way of doing things. It takes time to fully comprehend and then make the mental jump to shed the old and embrace the new. The caba PM team recognised this, ensured users had sufficient time, and were fully motivated to meet the testing requirement head-on. To support this, Bluelight Functional Consultants were on hand on site to facilitate this transition and work with the users as they got up to speed with testing.

The team at Bluelight was approachable, from the Managing Director to the Project Manager and the consultants. Bluelight was adaptable and able to respond to provide the support to meet the best changing and emerging needs in a fast-paced project.

In addition to this reactive support, a complete package of scheduled support was provided, which, for example, allowed for routine daily check-ins with the Functional, Data and Technical Consultants to allow users to ask questions and solve issues.

THE OUTCOME

The 11-month project kicked off in February 2022 with a go-live requirement for January 2023.

The most definitive outcome was a project that was delivered on time and to budget, meeting all the key requirements of the initial scope, which were

• a CRM fully integrated with a membership and events portal
• Data migration from the legacy CRM, Workbooks
• additional integrations with third-party systems

Another important element of the project for caba was that from start to finish, they were supported by the same Bluelight team – The Lead Consultant, Functional Consultant, Data Consultant, Project Manager and Project Sponsor. This had an enormous positive impact on continuity and relationship building; even now, the same functional consultants are involved in helping the system evolve through the Support Desk mechanism.

THE BENEFITS

The benefits caba is realising from their new integrated CRM and Portal include the ability to meet the expectations of individuals better and facilitate the capture of audience preferences to enable communications to be tailored to them and delivered in different formats through various channels. 

Individuals can access their data and update it easily and efficiently. Further to this, individuals have full oversight of all their past engagements and interactions with caba and can apply for support online and track the progress of their support application, submit key supporting documents and answer queries.

caba has a modern technology solution which enables the integration of systems (CRM, web, email and finance systems) to provide seamless stakeholder experiences, such as requests for assistance, provision of supporting evidence, webinar bookings and payments, and management of payment plans. 

To respond to these external expectations, staff have a modern and flexible system that supports streamlined processes, workflow, and automation. The new system is more flexible and extendable to support operations in the longer term, with employees having enough technical autonomy to respond to changing business objectives. This is supported by having a CRM that allows recording and real-time reporting on measurement data.

The year-long digital transformation has culminated in a new capability which now delivers caba to: 

• offer the community quality information, guidance, advice, and signposting across a broad range of subjects relating to good health and well-being tailored to everyday circumstances
• offer quality support, aid and intervention to people in more exceptional circumstances who need caba’s support most,
• understand the profession and deliver tailored services and support to meet needs
• advocate for change within the profession on the challenges people face
• be transparent and welcome the contribution the community can make to caba’s work
• enable the community to engage with caba simply and quickly, at any given point, in a way that suits
• be a well-managed and sustainable charity, a good employer and an organisation that takes its role and responsibilities seriously
• make meaningful progress in putting the audience in control of the relationship they have with caba
• transition caba into a contemporary charity that is focused, accessible, responsive and insight-led.

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