Prince’s Trust to use “frugal innovation” to reach extra one million young people
- Summary:
- Rebecca Galambos, the Prince’s Trust’s Digital Transformation Director, sees frugal innovation as a way to enhance essential programs for young people.
With estimates that there are currently over 800,000 young people in the UK not in education, work or training, the Prince’s Trust plays a critical role in helping those at a disadvantage by providing them with education, motivation and support.
However, the Trust hopes to help 1 million people over the next ten years, which is no small task given that it has helped 825,000 since it launched forty years ago. To speed up its reach, the Prince’s Trust is looking internally to understand how it can better improve its processes, systems and ways of working.
Rebecca Galambos, the organisation’s Digital Transformation Director, took to the stage at Oracle’s Digital Transformation IT Summit today in London to explain the importance of what the Trust is doing and the critical role that technology plays in achieving its goals. She said:
I’m here to talk to you about how…we are building the foundation for how to reach more young people. Not being in employment, education or training undermines your mental health. One in 10 of these young people don’t want to leave their home. Some 50% of these young people are very anxious about meeting new people. And an astonishing 46% don’t feel comfortable making eye contact. That doesn’t feel like a problem solved to me.
We help young people that are unemployed, or are leaving care, that have been excluded from school, have been in trouble with the law. We help them with seven programs. Seven programs that help them with financial support, but mostly it’s about helping them with key skills to regain the motivation, to regain confidence, to actually have hope.
We have reached 825,000 in the last forty years, but we don’t stop there. In the next ten years we want to reach another million.
Mapping the journey
Galambos explained that the Prince’s Trust reached 59,000 young people this year and three out of four reached what she called a “positive outcome”. For example, the Trust helped them get back into education, employment, training or volunteering.
However, Galambos said that the Trust had been reaching its capacity and needed to reassess its operations. She said:
We are an ambitious organization. Reaching an extra million from 825,000, operationally, is complete suicide. It costs us £1,000 to help a young person through a Prince’s Trust program. Looking inside we have reached an operational tipping point, if you will.
What we found was antiquated systems, slow and sometimes inaccurate reporting, a website that wasn’t mobile-enabled and really was quite difficult for the young person to navigate.
Galambos said she believes the answer lies in frugal innovation. She said:
When you take away the comfort of resources. When you take away the comfort of the specialist consultant that flies in from some fancy place in San Francisco. When you take away the automated testing tools, when you take away all of the things we can’t afford, you’ve got to get creative. We have got creative and blown all of our goals and measurables.
To get a better idea of how these systems and programs could be made more efficient, Galambos and her team went about mapping the journey of a young person’s interactions with the Prince’s Trust. She said:
We mapped the young person’s journey, through the point of becoming aware of us, the initial contact with us, the actual matching to the right program, attending the program and then the follow through. What we found was lots of siloed-working, attrition, words that are true for any commercial organization.
They also assessed what Galambos calls the ‘benefits realisation program’, which has four core pillars. These include:
- Maximized income by having better data for donors
- Reduced cost by streamlining processes
- Growth in number of young people reached
- Increased positive outcomes and a better quality for that young person.
The Prince’s Trust decided that the best answer to tackling these siloed systems and achieving the above priorities was by rolling out an ‘integrated digital platform’ with Oracle. Galambos said:
On the 9th of November we launched what I would call an integrated digital platform to our staff, to our employees, to our partners and to our young people. [It included] new ways of working, backed by a really elaborate, well thought through culture change program.
We improved business processes, some of it very analogue, just ways of working, and some of it automated. And we launched three of the Oracle products, a new website, a new BI system and a new CRM system.
The benefits and unintended consequences
Galambos said that within 90 days of the system launching, she “couldn’t be more proud” and that the Prince’s Trust has “exceeded its goals”. She added that because of the results that her team is seeing from the new platform, she has gained confidence from staff and leadership within the organisation.
She said:
For us, the reporting has been incredible. The time it takes the team to produce the monthly report has reduced by four days. And the kitchen sink report that we would normally get, which is frankly unreadable and untranslatable, has been a real eye opener.
We have had a 63% increase in calls to our customer service centre. It’s incredibly heartwarming to know that people pick up the phone. This means that we have grabbed the young person, we have matched the young person to the right outreach staff in the right region and helped them get onto the right program.
We have had 20% increase to our website, 90% now also stay for longer, 19% do stuff on the website and it’s really a testament to an incredible team.
However, despite being pleased with the outcomes, Galambos did note that the Trust now faces some new operational challenges form having increased its reach and improved its interactions with young people that need its help. It is now having to deal with new demand. She said:
It’s been an amazing journey, but that means we are now facing a bit of an operational challenge. We have got 12,000 young people sitting in our CRM system, in a queue system that blinks red, which stresses my frontline people, saying that they are ready to be matched to a programme.
Some people may say we are victims of our own success, but it’s kind of not funny, because we know that once that young person has contacted us we have a limited amount of time to get back to them and get them on a program. If they’ve built up that courage, we need to respond quickly.
The Prince’s Trust is now looking at how it can better share its processes to help solve this demand issue and is looking at how it can incorporate new online learning tools. She said:
And so now we are accelerating the team into phase two, which is taking our seven core programmes and streamlining the share processes, automating or digitising those shared processes, getting them up into the CRM system, pulling the data through the BI, responding with campaigns and whatever it takes through our new website. And moving to think, how can we offer learning online?
Harvard, Stanford, all of them offer online learning today. But how do we reach out to young people? The spectrum is wide and we are keen to work with our partners to figure out how to best offer online learning. Because we are not going to make a million unless we really come up with a solution that is useful and works for our young people.
Galambos concluded:
We stand at a crossroads for the Prince’s Trust. We are all about face-to-face, we are all about saving lives, we are all about supporting more young people. And the next 12-18 months are going to be critical to us achieving that dream.
Disclosure - at time of writing, Oracle is a premier partner of diginomica.