The Challenge
The equestrian charity's data challenges were ones many charities face around business transformation. They were collecting increasing amounts of data but now needed to get real value out of it through integration and migration of data to the cloud. In short; they needed to maximise donations.
The remit was to analyse the data and determine where they could become more efficient across costs, sales and the charity as a whole.
Specifically, they wanted to gain full visibility of donations around GiftAid to ensure the charity could maximise its impact. To do this they needed to conduct a full audit to understand:
What data did they collect?
What were all their data entry points?
What was their full storage model?
To add to the urgency their senior developer of 25 years was leaving the company and so ensuring a successful transference of their knowledge was paramount.
They had spent six months trying to find a database analyst or architect in the contract market with the right skill set (SEQUEL, .NET, financial background in charity law, tax and GiftAid), without success. So they asked yechte to help.
The Approach
The charity was initially hesitant to engage with yechte, as they have worked with recruitment consultants before.
However, understanding we are digital consultants (i.e. we are a group of consultants who all work front line with businesses), and seeing the results we’ve achieved for our clients, they decided to move forward.
yechte began with a thorough strategic understanding of their brief and what the charity was trying to achieve, both immediately but also long term.
Through the analysis, we determined what were the technical and vertical skillsets the consultant actually needed to have and where the charity could support in onboarding them. In short, they needed someone to tell them “the narrative from the numbers”.
The approach yechte proposed delivered an architect in 24 hours for an interview with more experience than they were expecting. Besides their experience in Data Ops and Data Leads for Central Banking, Government, AWS, Azure, they were also a (highly sought after) Microsoft MVP Data and Business Analyst.
The model yechte provided for the charity also managed to extend the consultative support model by three times, all within their budget.
Due to the on-boarding process that we take our clients through, our consultant was able to hit the ground running on day one.
They started by implementing our business continuity framework to ensure documentation and process mapping was fully understood before their Senior Developer left.
In parallel to this, our consultant was able to conduct the deep level of analysis actually required given the complexity, including:
Data Mapping
Data Mining
- Data Modelling
Providing recommendations and next steps to best analyse the data (e.g. Flat model, Relational/Rationale Model, or Data Vault Model)
The Results
At the time this case study was written the project hasn’t finished, but because of the impact our consultant made within the first month the charity was looking to explore extending the contract to a further 12 months.
Our consultant also supported, trained, and up-skilled internal team members, including recommending documents and proposing workflows internally to help their team move forward.
Initial feedback from the charity is how impressed they were with the consultant we were able to provide, including:
"How quickly they've got into detail"
"How quickly they understood charity and GiftAid"
"How skilled they were"
"How culturally they fit into the team"
"The probing questions they asked (understanding the team, senior spread, what kinds of tasks the charity is doing)"
The charity's legal team came back and said: “they had never worked so quickly with an agency that gave them exactly what they needed!”
If you would like to understand how yechte can support your business transformation projects then please get in touch.