Wildlife conservation organization improves service, eliminates errors and boosts efficiency

Company overview

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a charitable organization in England, Wales and Scotland that promotes the conservation of birds and the wider natural environment. In 2020, the RSPB had 2,000 employees, 12,000 volunteers and 1.2 million members, making it one of the world’s largest wildlife conservation organizations. Their goal is to make certain that, by 2025, at least 20% of land across the United Kingdom is managed to ensure no loss of protected areas.

Business challenges

Due to its reliance on donations to meet its strategic objectives, RSPB is continually expanding its supporter database. The organization adds roughly 3,000 contacts a week from multiple sources including face-to-face recruitment, donations and requests for information.

RSPB’s database of more than one million members was struggling to handle the increase in supporter data. The database often crashed and required many manual system updates to ensure it worked efficiently – and was not intuitive or flexible to use.

In addition, while they used automation for data processing, the automation occurred outside of business hours and the team was unable to determine whether processes had run successfully until the next working day.

Solution

As it sought a new solution to address these challenges, the charity wanted to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud-based automation solution. In moving to the cloud, it hoped to avoid the cost and hassle of managing its own infrastructure, servers and their maintenance while increasing organization agility and new donor development speed.

The answer was RunMyJobs by Redwood, the industry-leading cloud-based process automation platform. The solution dramatically boosted the efficiency of RSPB’s Supporter Data Management team, eliminating errors from its database and enhancing the effectiveness of interactions with supporters.

The simplicity of Redwood’s cloud solution meant that RSPB’s Supporter Data Management team was able to implement the Redwood solution in just 13 days without the need for IT assistance.

RSPB now automates processes such as checking bank account details against contact records and flagging larger donations so that they can be dealt with on a more personal level. It also automates member services, prompting fulfillment teams to send out membership packs, letters for direct debit requests, quarterly magazines and regular membership mail. Altogether, Redwood automates more than 100 different mission-critical processes, dramatically increasing the productivity of the RSPB team.

Results

With automation, RSPB was able to manage significantly more data. At the same time, the cloud-based Redwood service has reduced downtime. RunMyJobs’ single-tenant cloud architecture requires zero-effort for maintenance and guarantees 99.95% uptime.

“We have saved at least 10 working days each year through the lack of hardware failure alone – not to mention the time saved through the increased efficiency of Redwood,” says Andrew.

In addition, the team can now more readily check and monitor after-hours workload using any internet browser, eliminating the need for remote access to internal servers.

The usage-based pricing model of Redwood’s cloud platform also meant that RSPB could expand or scale back as needed.

The future with Redwood

RSPB is now on a strategic mission to create a “single customer view,” based on master data management concepts. They expect Redwood to be a critical part of their environment to support this initiative.