Charityshare

Conceived by the NSPCC and the Children’s Society and launched in 2005, Charityshare offers operational cost savings of up to 25% by sharing all operational IT services such as a helpdesk, purchasing and technical support. Some of the largest charities, such as AgeUK, Alzheimer’s Society and The Children’s Society trust Charityshare for their IT services.

Charityshare demonstrates that innovative and successful collaborative working between charities to the benefit of those that the charities serve is practical, effective and economical.

The Problem

Charityshare is very much an IT services company and offers their customers SLAbased performance guarantees. Overtime, the network infrastructure that had previously been installed had become out of date, so much so that it was to be phased out by the service provider. In addition its age meant that it wasn’t able to support Charityshare’s aims and objectives in terms of responsiveness, costs and performance. The network had become an increasingly expensive roadblock to expansion.

The Solution

Freedom provided Charityshare with a single point of contact for the design, implementation and management of a connectivity solution that supports and enhances not only Charityshare’s objectives but also those of Charityshare’s customers.

Form our analysis and design, we determined that each of the major charities support by Charityshare have a significant high street presence of retail stores, amounting to a total of 550 sites distributed across the UK. We also determined that the different charities have their own working practices and retail technologies such as PDQ tills which allow for Gift Aid donations directly from the till and Email and VOIP also required.

Some of the charities had a further requirement to future-proof their stores’ communications needs as some of the charities will continue to innovate business supporting services such as video booths for customer service requirements.

In order to support all of this Freedom designed and deployed an MPLS “Cloudbased” solution, which enables the combined total of 550 retail stores to access the central shared and secure Primary Data Centre. The MPLS Cloud is reached from the stores by QoS-enabled PADSL circuits. The Primary Data Centre (PDC) has a hot-standby Secondary Data Centre (SDC), [both of which are connected to the MPLS cloud by 100Mbps Ethernet connections?]

The Primary and Secondary purpose-built data centres host Charities’ applications and data on servers that are geographically separated and connected by a high-speed data link for synchronous replication of critical data.

The individual charities’ Headquarters, irrespective of their location, are also connected directly to the PDC by way of a 100Mbps Ethernet point-to-point circuit.

In addition to this Charityshare offers a hosted contact centre solution, which is used by AgeUK to handle calls, including “blue light” calls, from the general public. This is supported by the Freedom solution by way of dual fail-over 100Mbps Ethernet circuits from the contact centre to the MPLS core.

Benefits Experienced

From the CEO’s perspective Charityshare has been able to move their business forwards by being able to cost effectively offer innovative network-supported services, something that their legacy network could not enable them to do. In addition Charityshare is able to offer their customers peace of mind due to the failover connections between servers and by becoming a single point of contact for their customers they have significantly simplified their customers IT, one of whom had nine different suppliers for MPLS-based services. Finally Charityshare, which is a non-for-profit organization, has the flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively offer their services to a wider number of customers.

The Finance Director has experienced a cost saving of 25%, which enables Charityshare, itself a non-for-profit organization, to reinvest more of its funds into services for their charitable customers. Allowing their customers to deploy smart terminals that enable Gift Aid at point of sale is an investment well spent.

The ease of new service deployment means that revenues are forecast to increase by x%?

The IT Team have been able to implement a solution to enable charityshare to grow as a business and to provides management reports to their customers for proactive network performance monitoring and on-line fault reporting. This enables Charityshare to provide and support SLA-based services to their customers.

In this case the end users are other charities and these benefit from reduced costs, an ever-important factor for not-for-profit organisations. In addition they now have the building blocks in place to let them take fullest advantage of web 2.0 and social media features.