Cats Protection's purr-fect solution for cloud communication
- Summary:
- The feline welfare charity is better positioned to share information with 10,000-strong volunteer base, thanks to cloud-based extranet makeover.
Every year, some 46,000 cats and kittens find new homes, thanks to Cats Protection, the UK’s largest feline welfare charity. More than 150,000 more are neutered, meanwhile, as the charity works tirelessly to curb over-population and prevent future cases of homelessness and abandonment.
Cats Protection couldn’t handle the work it faces without its nationwide network of around 10,000 volunteers who, alongside 500 employees, give up their time to foster cats, raise funds and work in the charity’s retail stores and adoption centres.
Those volunteers are a pretty assertive bunch, according to Tony Gamble, head of IT at Cats Protection. When he joined the charity three years ago, after years in the private sector, he set out to discover what volunteers needed from the charity in order to deliver on its objectives. They didn’t hold back, he says:
These are passionate people: nobody gives up their time and energy volunteering for an organisation like ours unless they’re really committed to the cause. What we get from them are some firm opinions and strong judgements on how we work as an organisation. Sometimes, that’s tough to hear - but it’s vital, so that we’re providing them with the tools and information they need to support the welfare of the cats in our care.
A major niggle among volunteers was the way in which the charity shared information with them. An elderly extranet suffered from accessibility issues and low usage rates, leaving volunteers in the dark when trying to decide, for example, whether a cat’s symptoms required veterinary treatment or the best way to trap a feral cat for neutering. Gamble says:
It quickly became very apparent that the way in which our systems were structured meant we just weren’t delivering that information in the way that volunteers needed it. They could never find the information they needed or couldn’t get the right level of access to that information.
Gamble decided a complete redesign of the extranet was required. Moving it to the cloud made perfect sense, he says, with a robust foundation of communication and collaboration technologies that volunteers would find easy to use.
A ‘discovery day’ visit to Microsoft UK in early 2014, and talks held there with the IT vendor’s charity specialists, persuaded him that the Office 365 suite could provide that foundation.
Initially, the software vendor offered Cats Protection 3,000 E1 licences for free - but that posed questions about how the charity could effectively serve a volunteer base more than three times that size.
When Microsoft upped its offer to unlimited licences - again, for free - the decision, says Gamble:
suddenly became much, much easier.
Feline good
With help from Cats Protection’s Microsoft partner, Foundation SP, the new extranet went live in early 2015. Some functionality is still being tested, says Gamble, and there are
governance issues still to be ironed out, but volunteers have welcomed it warmly:
If we look at the number of unique log-ins to the extranet that we get now, it’s probably up by a factor of ten. It’s been quite dramatic in that respect.
I think what we’ve done here is provided the tools for our volunteers to work more effectively and, in the process, help more cats. Our volunteer branches have got the right information. They have the guidance to see what they should be doing. They’re also sharing information more readily with other branches.
We’re a lot less parochial now than we’ve perhaps been in the past: [the extranet] has been a way of unifying the charity. There’s still some way to go there, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction along that path.
And they’ve proved more adept at using the technology than he ever expected, he adds.
One of the key things people told me when I came here was that the volunteer base would split into two camps: people who love cats but have no interest in going anywhere near technology; and those who love cats, love technology and have high expectations from it.
At some level, that’s broadly been true but, in the past year, we’ve seen a real change insofar as the majority of volunteers are much more at ease with technology than they have been in the past. That, to my mind, has come about because of the explosion of smartphone and tablet usage.
It’s probably fair to say that our demographic is on the mature side, but that no longer seems to be the issue it once was. Silver surfers are one of the fastest growing groups in terms of technology and we’re genuinely seeing signs of that here.