Facing An Uncertain Future

The Royal School of Church Music exists as a membership organisation, delivering products and services to its members (customers) to support them in their work. They had grown really well, but faced crucial challenges to the future success of the organisation:

• They knew which products generated the most revenue, but because the associated costs were in a separate system, they couldn’t easily tally the true profit.

• They knew that their membership was in overall decline, but they didn’t know which members generated the most income, which were the most active, or into which demographic they should target their recruitment.

• And they knew that if they continued to guess at the answers to these questions as they had been doing for the last few years, the future of the organisation was in jeopardy.

The director at RSCM, Stephen Mansfield, summed up his frustrations about their future:

“The best case scenario at that point was that you make some good guesses, and things start to pick up. But that is slow and frustrating. The alternative is even worse: the rot sets in, and you can’t figure out how to turn things around”

He knew if they could turn the data they had into information – into answers to their questions – they would be able to take the right action to turn things around.

A suite of solutions

ITWB were engaged to provide a range of solutions to help.

• Interactive, easy to use dashboards giving simple answers to the simple questions they needed to ask.

• The capability to drill down to get more detailed information – with a single click.

• Automatic assembly of the information each day – so time isn’t wasted working out where they are … they can focus on moving forward.

• No disruption to systems providing the data – the data is pulled from all the disparate systems in the business – CRM (customers), products/services and financials.

The Results

The resulting system brought clear benefits to the management team.

• Stephen is now able to make decisions based on facts…guess work is a thing of the past.

• He now has a clear picture of which products and services are most profitable, and which are not.

• Targeting of “right-fit” members is now possible – they have a clear understanding of who they are.

• The RSCM has now been able to move to a stable financial footing, and can focus on growing its membership.

Built on existing infrastructure

“Fortunately, this solution meant I didn’t need to change any of the underlying systems. It was more like plumbing in a tap. I now have information on the questions I need answering – up to date as of last night. Another click allows me to compare key numbers over time. And what’s more, I can compare one time-frame to another – to see if the actions we are taking are having the desired effect. In fact, in only a short time since we got hold of them, I now can’t imagine how I ever managed the business without them.”

– Stephen Mansfield, RSCM