Managing Cultural Change and Process Development at Sue Ryder Care

Situation

One of the UK’s leading charitable organisations, Sue Ryder Care supports people with a wide range of disabilities and life-shortening diseases, as well as their families, carers and friends both in this country and abroad.

In a major review fundraising and marketing activities, Sue Ryder Care’s then Director of Marketing & Fundraising, Steve Thomas, identified two problems that needed to be overcome. Firstly, Sue Ryder Care’s fundraisers lacked the information they needed to develop effective fundraising plans and communicate with their supporters. Secondly, what information could be obtained was proving very costly to produce, based on evidence provided by a benchmarking exercise.

Acting as project sponsor, Steve Thomas decided that Sue Ryder Care needed to invest money, time and energy in addressing these issues, and that somebody was needed to manage the project.  With a background in systems implementation at a large development charity, Keith Collins joined Sue Ryder Care to manage this project.

Both Steve Thomas and Keith Collins now work for Purple Vision. This case study shows how an organisation can manage change to gain better marketing insight and increase fundraising capability.

Challenges

Sue Ryder Care was a traditional and conservative organisation, with head office staff who were reluctant to embrace change, and regionally-based staff with a distrust of ‘central office’.

Whilst an investment in technology was necessary to provide improved management information, this investment needed to be accompanied by  a review of people and process issues before the full potential of the project could be realised.

The challenge was to not only secure funds and backing for an ambitious project from an organisation reluctant to change, but also to secure buy-in, approval and goodwill from a number of groups of sceptical users.

Like any other project, adherence to approved costs, timelines and quality metrics were also vital.

Solution

Work developing new processes and managing change was undertaken simultaneously with the cross-organisational implementation of the new fundraising database and management reporting software.

The key success factors were identified as the management of people’s expectations, the involvement of stakeholders in every step of the project, pro-active communication of progress and decisions relating to the project, and the use of pilot projects to test processes, systems and ideas before they were rolled-out.

Working with a project group recruited from stakeholders across Sue Ryder Care, project timelines were established and communicated, and resource levelling conducted to ensure that they could be achieved.

These key stakeholders then determined the nature and functions of the required system, and helped decide which supplier was chosen. They then devised new business processes to exploit the full potential of the system for the benefit of the organisation’s various fundraising activities.

Before delivering the system to Sue Ryder Care’s 18 Care Centres around the UK, the new fundraising system and associated new business processes were trialled at one site. Taking on board feedback from the pilot project, the database and new processes were rolled-out across all the regional sites.

Benefits

The development of new processes and sensitive management of change resulted in a number of benefits for Sue Ryder Care;

• Cross-organisational analysis of fundraising income and effectiveness from one information source

• 50% increase in Gift Aid income within 3 months of the project starting

• Increased administrative efficiency

• Time freed up for fundraisers from administrative tasks, enabling them to spend more time fundraising