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Comic Relief funds hundreds of amazing organisations who are working on the ground to support the most vulnerable people and communities in society.
Behind every organisation’s funding journey at Comic Relief there is an online system that collects information on the project, the organisation, and all the vital data we need to make and manage that funding responsibly, and effectively.
This week sees the transition of a pilot group of grantees and staff from our existing system to our new funding management portal, based on the Salesforce platform. By August this year we will be making and managing all of our funding on this system.
Why the switch?
The driver behind our decision to move is to work towards all of our organisational aims:
.Enabling us to be impact led by giving us better access to our information to guide our decisions, and to understand the impact our funding has had
Supporting our fundraising efforts and our ability to channel creativity through better sharing of information we hold internally about the need for our funding, and its impact
Using technology to allow us to be more efficient and to
work smarter, and offer our applicants and funded partners an improved experience to allow them to do the same
Approach to development
We’re working with implementing partners, Hyphen8, who are supporting us to get the best out of this technology. We’re also using an agile method of development, which means that we’ve been prioritising the things that allow us to just do the job that we need to do in the first instance. After we’ve launched we will be developing the system on a continuous basis, so we will see the benefits for all our users grow over time.
We’ve started the transition with a small pilot group to test that the switch is a smooth one, and to capture some early feedback to make any changes we can ahead of moving all of our active grants across, at the end of June.
Existing funded partners
Next week we’ll be communicating to all our funded partners about when the move to our new system will happen for them, what it means for them, and how we’ll support them with this. Upholding our commitment to ask funded partners how we’re doing, we will be asking them about their experience with our system to date. We’ll rerun these questions further down the line, to gather feedback and hold ourselves accountable to the change and the investment we’ve made. We’ll also be doing the same for our colleagues.
It is very much the beginning of this journey for us, but we’re feeling really optimistic that this move will help us work towards our organisational aims, enable us to carry out our day-to-day work more effectively, and ultimately support us with the vital business of funding amazing organisations across the UK and around the world.
