OnSide
Overview
OnSide’s vision is to provide every town and city in the UK with quality, safe and affordable facilities that allow young people to spend their leisure time engaging in fun but productive activities, supported by positive adult role models, which improve their life chances, choices and opportunities.
Established in 2008, OnSide was the creation of Bill Holroyd CBE, former Chair of Bolton Lads and Girls Club (BLGC) and Jerry Glover MBE. During his time as Chair, Bill realised that other towns and cities would clearly benefit from a first class facility like BLGC. Bolton has now been joined by Youth Zones in Blackburn, Carlisle, Chorley, Manchester, Oldham, Wigan, Wirral, Wolverhampton with new facilities soon to be opened in Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Croydon, East Manchester and Warrington.
The charity’s supporters have invested over £100m in young people since the inception of OnSide, and today members make around 500,000 visits per year to Youth Zones across the country.
The challenge
Before the project, each of the Youth Zones managed by OnSide ran their own separate Salesforce org to manage members and track their visits and payments.
makepositive reviewed OnSide’s 5 existing Salesforce orgs and recommended that OnSide move operations to one Salesforce org. This would allow useful statistics to be collated across all of the Youth Zones and enable OnSide to benefit from the economies of scale around customising and supporting one org rather than multiple orgs. This was also a great opportunity to rebuild the solution, using Salesforce best practice, improving on the data structure and incorporating more of the rich functionality that Salesforce has to offer.
The solution
makepositive conducted requirement gathering workshops with the 3 Youth Zones that agreed to make the jump to the new org, building a great relationship with them and working together closely to streamline diverse processes into one unified process and develop the solution. We held regular show & tells with OnSide to keep them up to date with progress and to tweak the solution as required along the way.
Data migration involved the extraction, transformation and load of 1 million records from the 3 different legacy orgs to the new unified data structure, no mean feat!
In addition, we conducted end user and administrator training sessions along with the creation of a user guide to help OnSide to be self-sufficient when setting up new Youth Zones in the future.
Following 3 successful go-lives for the existing Youth Zones, we supported OnSide over a number of weeks whilst the system bedded in.
The results
- OnSide can now collect and analyse membership and participation information at a network level at the push of a button; whilst also protecting data to ensure privacy of information within each Youth Zone, saving several days of reporting effort on a monthly basis
- At any given time, the Youth Zones can view, at a glance, the split of members within each Youth Zone building according to age, sex and other key categories
- Youth Workers use Salesforce on handheld Android devices to record member attendance at organised activities and to flag those that are progressing well
- OnSide are able to record a member’s views of different aspects of their wellbeing at any point of time and convert this into numerical indicators that can be compared over time at a Youth Zone and individual level
- Youth Zones can now provide the information gathered above to existing and potential investment partners, clearly demonstrating the impact of participation in a Youth Zone; fundamental statistics for securing ongoing and future investment
- Improvements to the data structure led to 63% reduction on total data storage.
- Kathryn Morley, Chief Executive of OnSide said: “The development work undertaken by makepositive was game changing for the Youth Zone network. The data we are now able to collect through the Salesforce Org gives us insight into our membership profile, continually informs improvements to our offer for young people, drives up engagement and helps us to ensure every young person gets the best possible experience from their time spent in a Youth Zone.”