Tackling staffing and data problems at Prostate Cancer UK

Troubleshooter Gerardo Del Guercio MBE on making the charity more responsive

Attracting and retaining good technical staff is a challenge for almost all organisations. Skills are portable, large organisations pay top dollar, and the environment is in constant flux.

This is especially true of charitable and third sector organisations. Case in point, Prostate Cancer UK, the charity that supports research and raises awareness of the disease, as well as providing support to sufferers.

Because of funding constraints, IT professionals recruited by the charity tend to fall into two distinct camps, says solutions architect Gerardo Del Guercio.

First there are student placements, interns and people embarking on their career. Enthusiastic, motivated, eager to learn and often great ambassadors for the charity on social media, but unfortunately they don't tend to hang around.

"At a certain stage they've got to go get their mortgages or their families. They need more disposable income. That's a given."

Then you have IT professionals reaching the end of their careers who want to give something back and for whom the principle is more important than the pay.

The problem is, there's no career ladder between the two. There's a shortage of people in the middle with domain experience who also understand how the system and the business logic works.

Data latency

In large organisations and government, where Del Guercico spent many years working on digitisation and data management programmes (for which he was awarded an MBE), those gaps are typically filled by expensive consultants - something not available to a charity.

At Prostate Cancer UK (PCUK), which he joined three years ago, he found an overloaded IT team coping with constant staff churn and unable to change the systems they used. In terms of outcomes, the result was what Del Guercico calls 'data latency', or things not happening quickly enough because the information pipleline is inflexible, blocked and unresponsive. As a result, qualified IT staff were spending the day manually downloading data from fundraising sites, processing and uploading it, and generally fighting fires as they arose. Fundraisers, too, were sometimes having to pitch in to help the IT staff.

It was becoming seriously problematic. Someone registering a marathon run to support PCUK, would hope and expecat to be acknowledged swiftly and enthusiastically by the charity, but because of bottlenecks in the data flow replies might take "weeks or months - or never," Del Guercico said - it would take that long for the information to be passed onto the fundraising staff.

"If you're a fundraiser you want to feel that people are listening to you and appreciate you. You're doing us a favour but we just weren't responsive enough".

Internally, too, there were issues in setting up new events. In fact, expectations of the IT and data team were so low the rest of the organisation had given up on asking them to deliver a report let alone anything new, said Del Guercico.

"We are the supporting structure, we are the pillars underneath charity, but we weren't getting any requests. That's a team failure, an organisation failure."

Systemic atrophy

Sadly, this picture is common to most charities, according to Del Guercico. They are increasingly reliant on IT but find it hard to be sufficiently agile in a changing landscape, given operational and staffing constraints.

First there's the ballooning number of fundraising platforms; there are dozens including Facebook and JustGiving and many smaller one, each of which must be integrated into the system. Another issue is the variety of data sources, web forms, APIs and data formats, all of which can change without warning and which again must be flexibly accommodated. Then there's the need to support donations by phone, to perform upgrades to the CRM software, to handle new campaigns and promotions, and so on, and so on.

"All those kinds of things, all these changes just keep coming," Del Guercico explained. "But the data team didn't have the skillset or didn't have the time, to be fair, because they're always chasing this carrot."

Changing the data architecture

Unlike many charities, PCUK has been able to an experienced solution architect. Del Guercico joined the charity three years ago, thanks to funding provided by supporter Fidelity Group, when the true scale of the organisation's fundraising data problems had become apparent. He turned his attention to the underlying extract, transform, load (ETL) problem, breaking it into its constituent parts and implementing a new message broker to automate and streamline the process of integrating the data and getting it into the hands of the fundraising staff as quickly as possible.

The lo-code data automation platform Toca is used to automatically extract data from websites and APIs as batch processes that running overnight, with staff only alerted if something has changed, relieving them of their previous tedious and time-consuming daily task of logging onto multiple websites and downloading data. That data is then transformed and formatted using SQL scripts before being uploaded via a message into the Raiser's Edge CRM.

Sometimes human interaction is required, such as when a fundraising website changes its download page or where several entries appear to be from the same person, but exception handling is now an early morning task for one member of staff rather than the whole team, and they have built dashboards in Toca to make this easier.

Blue sky thinking

Del Guercico estimates the new system has saved around 2,200 hours of manual data processing per year and has made the organisations much more responsive.

"Our users didn't ask the data team to do anything because they knew they couldn't do anything. They are now saying when can we have it? We now have the data to meet the blue sky thinking, the blue sky demands. It's just continuous, which is good because it means that we're actually meeting the expectations."

As an example, the charity recently ran a campaign with NHS England asking men to check their cancer risk, resulting in 555,000 using its online tool, and expecting a response. "Without our automation, we'd still be loading it up. There's no way we could handle it."

The time saved allows existing staff to hone their technical skills, and the ease of use of the platform makes it easier to attract and retain trainees and promote staff from within by providing a career path. For example, a former fundraiser "with a bit of tech, he did a sports science degree", was transformed into a "good SQL programmer."

"When you're using the right tools in the right places, that allows us as a charity to take advantage."