The Prince’s Trust has launched a new website and new IT systems to help it reach more young people, as part of a three year strategy to transform its digital services.

Its new site is mobile-responsive, unlike its previous one, and the charity has also a new customer-relationship management system and reporting system to help it track its users.

Rebecca Galambos, programme director at the Prince’s Trust, told Civil Society News that they charity started the process a year ago because it realised it was spending a lot of its resources delivering the charity’s programmes.

“We want to make the charity more efficient so we can spend more time working with young people,” she said.

She described the charity’s investment in the project as “significant” and said that the charity had also received pro bono support from the firms involved.

Providing young people “with a good journey” is at the heart of the programme, with the new site designed to make it easy for young people to access information.

“Our previous website was not mobile responsive,” Galambos said, but it needed to be because “if young people face barriers interacting with us through our website it only adds to their problems”.

The Prince’s Trust is now looking at putting more of its resources online “ensuring that young people always have resources to hand”.

Better monitoring of service users

The charity’s previous CRM system was “outdated”, Galambos said, “making it hard for us to track how young people were doing and if they were staying with us” and meaning that programme staff were “spending an incredible amount of time,” trying to do so.

With the new systems the charity is able to easily follow “young people on a journey from the point they are aware of us to the point that they leave with a positive outcome,” she said.

This means that staff have more time to spend working directly with young people. The charity is now looking at how it can automate more of its processes.

Involving staff

In the run-up to the launch of the transformation programme the charity has carried out a number of things to explain the process to its staff.

Galambos said: “In some ways the technology is by far the easy piece – the hard part is taking the staff with you.”

The charity has appointed digital champions within different teams and has held face-to-face training. The human resources and internal communications teams have spent time making sure that “all our staff understand how, why and when we are doing things”.

“Early indications from the soft launch on Friday are really positive about how easy the systems are to use,” Galambos said.

The new CRM system was created by software provider Oracle. The charity has also worked with a number of other technology firms including Oracle's partner, Infomentum, as well as the creative agency Rufus Leonard and digital marketing agency iProspect. 

• The Charity Technology Conference, organised by Civil Society Media, takes place on 19 November, and will include sessions creating the right culture for digital transformation and the key principles of integration. View the full programme and book online here.