Livability save 130 hours per month & £19K annually
Charities
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Results & ROI
- Total saving across income processing of 130 hours per month
- Equates to £19,000k per annum
- Further time savings increasingly occurring in other parts of the process as it improves
- Donations processed immediately and supporters thanked straightaway
The client
Livability is a Christian disability and community engagement charity providing a wide range of services for disabled and disadvantaged adults and children. Formed in 2007 by merging The Shaftesbury Society and John Grooms, its foundations date back 160 years. Fundraising forms a core part of providing sufficient funds to achieve the charity’s aims.
The challenge
Livability identified that the fundraising function was not aligned to the overall charity and was suffering from a lack of direction or an overall plan. It was felt that the service needed to be streamlined and updated to meet present and future needs rather than rely on past patterns and activities. The relationship between fundraising and other departments was not as collaborative as it could be, with overly-complex processes and difficulties in finding the right information. The objectives were to understand the current state and identify priority areas for improvement.
The approach
We worked with the team to identify which of their key processes to focus on first (using a SIPOC diagram) and selected the ‘Ask’ process and income processing. We mapped and understood current value streams, involving staff from other departments where the end-to-end processes crossed into other teams. In the Ask process we found silo working, complexity, lack of clarity and high levels of variation. In income processing we found excess processing, duplication, different coding, batching, long cycle-times and overly-complex ways of working.
We supported the team to redesign on Lean principles with the first focus for implementation being income processings as there were so many problems impacting income and reputation with supporters. The Ask process has been redesigned and is due for implementation.
The benefits
In addition to numerical savings in terms of time, meaning donations can be banked more quickly, other benefits include:
- Immediate processing gives more control of physical income
- Increased capacity created by saved time – to focus on important vale-adding work
- More accurate coding has reduced time spent on rework
- Treasury spend less time sorting and resolving issues with the payment file
- Greater intelligence about effectiveness of the ‘ask’ as donations can be measured immediately, leading to better decision-making
- Fewer errors in coding
- An improved understanding of the value of and need for continuous improvement