How charities are using customer applications to boost support

RSPCA

Technology is playing a key role in helping the RSPCA to achieve its education goal of helping people to understand how to love animals. The charity’s website is vital to this, as while it has a few branches that can offer education, they can’t engage with and reach everyone.

“That’s the barrier,” says Lee Read, prevention and education project lead at RSPCA. “Instead, what we’re trying to do is empower everyone who can educate to educate on our behalf. A lot of educators love animals, but they don’t necessarily know what to teach young people or how to teach them.”

When Read joined the RSPCA in May 2022, his first task was to look at the existing website of more than 500 web pages to consolidate it. He realised that rather than going through 500 pages and spending a lot of money trying to update the existing PDFs, it would be better to refocus the site to focus on editable, dynamic content, and a way to understand how people are using the resources.

The charity teamed up with Liferay and Webtown to develop a new version of its education website based on those aims. It now offers bespoke learning packages for time-poor teachers, and downloadable activities for families, which can all be accessed easily and quickly directly from the site. Since go-live, engagement on the digital learning platform has increased by 38%.

One area where the website upgrade is making a real difference is the RSPCA’s partnership with the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Participants in the scheme are now able to access a series of practical activities, save them to a dashboard and show evidence they have completed that work.

Investing the time and resources required for this technology upgrade is paying off regarding user engagement too. If the RSPCA had continued with its old website, it would have been engaging around 100,000 people between 2023 and 2030, according to Read. When the new site went live in October 2023, the target was to have 150,000 page engagements; as it currently stands, the charity is projecting to have close to 300,000, so almost double the engagement rate.

While the charity is benefiting from its website investment, it would like to see more work done around virtual reality (VR).

“If [young people] really love the idea of seeing animals in real life, we fulfilled that with videos, but the next step would be something virtual reality-based,” says Read. “We have seen some of that incorporated in some people’s work, but I don’t think it’s where it perhaps needs to be right now. It’s also very difficult to try to achieve with the likes of headsets and sending those out to schools or to families and getting them back. It’s the accessibility, that’s the main barrier.”

Irish Deaf Society

The Irish Deaf Society (IDS) is the only provider in Ireland that offers a range of courses for Deaf learners in their first language, Irish Sign Language (ISL). The charity provides accredited ISL courses for those who are Deaf, hard of hearing or hearing.

Online and blended learning programmes have removed geographical barriers that were, until recently, faced by the Deaf community across Ireland. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, IDS swiftly transitioned from traditional classroom-based learning to online delivery via Zoom.

The charity then wanted to upgrade to a learner management system that could enhance the quality of education by making it more modern, engaging and continuous. Visual learning materials such as video in ISL are also extremely important and, as such, digital storage space is crucial.  

IDS is now using D2L Brightspace, which offers a range of content design features and, more importantly, the storage capacity that is essential for the charity. Users are now able to access learning opportunities in both synchronous and asynchronous ways, offering 24/7 flexibility.  

“D2L Brightspace also offered the benefit of centralising much of the IDS programme administration, which had previously been quite disparate, so it has streamlined much of the work for teachers and support staff,” says Paul Grundy, digital education officer at IDS.

Since spring 2022, when IDS began delivering courses via Brightspace, 1,732 learners have benefitted from online courses delivered via the system. Grundy adds that learner numbers have steadily increased term-on-term, and each term either a new subject or a new level of course is added to the platform.  

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust 

As Yorkshire Wildlife Trust has seen turnover rise from £4m to £12m, its old finance system was struggling to keep up with the growth.

With around 45,000 members, 111 nature reserves and 200 staff members, technology is crucial for day-to-day operations. This is the case whether it’s those out in the field surveying with geographic information systems or using drones for monitoring, or someone raising a purchase order or approving expenses.

“We realised that there was an awful lot of friction in the way that we were operating our organisation,” says Darren Tiffney, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust director of finance and central services. “We wanted to bake in some efficiencies, to bring our team closer to the centre of the organisation, and to good data and good processes, and see if we can automate something that might make their lives easier.” 

YWT is at the start of a major digital transformation project, which so far has involved migrating from a legacy on-premise finance system to Iplicit’s cloud accounting platform; installing a dedicated charity CRM system called Access thankQ CRM; and for HR and payroll, it rolled out People First from MHR around a year ago.

The Trust’s next two major projects are a SharePoint migration and a project management system to unite some of its KPI data and activity data.

“We’ve hit the low hanging fruit, things like CRM systems, health and safety systems, finance systems, HR systems,” Tiffney says. “Project activity management, the broader access to data files – those sorts of things are a bit more complex. And then there’s the bigger picture of how to bring them all together. That’s the kind of work that we’re evolving into now.”

Age UK

Age UK has been exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for providing information and advice on any topic that might crop up as people get older. This ranges from welfare benefits and social care, to local authority support and health questions.

From its testing of AI to help answer some of those queries, the technology doesn’t seem accurate enough yet to directly put a version of it in front of the general public, however.

“In our testing, it was only able to give the right answer nine out of 10 times,” says Alasdair Stewart, Age UK director of national services. “When we’re dealing with welfare benefits, which is potentially thousands of pounds a year for an older person, or paying for social care – tens of thousands of pounds of fees potentially – it’s just not accurate enough yet to put it in that kind of space.”

Instead, the charity has been focusing its efforts more on the ability to use AI with a human in the loop to empower and support advisers. Age UK is exploring Twilio’s Agent Copilot tool as a way to provide a transcript of calls and a summary after a call takes place.

Stewart says: “At the moment, our staff team would spend a number of minutes after a call writing up what the call was about, what help we provided, what the next steps were that we advised, and what options or support we provided so that if that customer called back in, another adviser would be able to pick it up.”

It’s quicker if the call-taker can work from the notes in the summary provided for them, he adds, editing it as necessary, rather than having to write everything up from scratch. They can then drop those notes into Age UK’s CRM and move on to the next call.

While the charity doesn’t think AI is sufficiently accurate and advanced enough yet to put directly in front of its service users, it’s already seeing value in how AI can speed up processes, tasks and activities its staff teams have to do to deliver services, and make them more effective and efficient. Ultimately, that means Age UK can help more people and drive more intelligence.

“If we have detailed transcripts from our calls, we can then gain a much better understanding from the 600,000 conversations that we’re having every year with older people, with the friends and family of older people, and using that intelligence from those calls to inform the advocacy and influencing work we do with the government,” Stewart adds.

This work includes encouraging the UK government not to cut the winter fuel payment, a decision it subsequently reversed; and to maintain the triple lock for pensions. AI has an important role to play in this advocacy work, as it gives Age UK greater insight into the concerns and needs of its user base, which it can then apply to supporting older people across the nation.

Children with Cancer UK

As part of its digital transformation program, Children with Cancer UK has been modernising its core systems to create more resilient, secure and data-driven processes. This includes implementing Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud to personalise communication and optimise fundraising journeys, which in turn improves donor engagement and retention, and ultimately generates more income.

“On Marketing Cloud, we have made significant progress in transforming our supporter journey,” says Fadil Dugolli, head of IT at Children with Cancer UK. “Our London Marathon journeys, for example, are fully built and automated end to end allowing us to deliver timely personalised communication at scale.”

The system has led to a reduction in manual administration around registration fees and payments, which has freed up teams to focus on building meaningful relationships with runners and supporters. This has had a direct financial benefit – although Children with Cancer UK had fewer runners in the London Marathon this year, it managed to fundraise 5% more money than last year.

While there are plenty of concrete examples of the benefits of technology investment to the charity sector, Dugolli feels the charity sector struggles to articulate a clear vision of what technology can truly deliver.

“Often it’s seen as a cost rather than a strategic enabler,” he adds. “That’s what they need to articulate quite early in the process, technology is an investment, but it’s also an enabler in today’s age, if you want to have that 360 digital view of your supporters.”

As these five charities show, investing in modern technology systems can help to increase donations, improve relationships with supporters and free up staff to focus on high-value tasks.