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Derrick McCourt, Regional Manager, Microsoft
Our Citizenship work is a great way of enabling our people to work together outside their day-to-day teams. I am immensely proud of the track record the team here is building up.
In Scotland one of our community partners is nonprofit Aberlour. Founded in 1875, Aberlour is the largest Scottish children's charity. They provide help to over 6,000 of Scotland's most vulnerable children, young people and their families each year. They have over 700 staff working across Scotland in more than 40 service centers, helping children and young people who need additional care and support to achieve their potential and to live safe and fulfilling lives.
Microsoft with paint brushes to the ready at Aberlour’s Borders Options service
It’s fair to say you don’t work at Microsoft without having a passion for technology, and the myriad ways it can help people and organizations to realize their full potential. What struck us in our early meetings with Aberlour was that they share a similar level of passion – in their case a passion to improve the lives of vulnerable children and young people. They’re a forward thinking organization with a strong vision of how technology could transform the effectiveness and reach of their work. They combine this vision with a tremendous commitment and enthusiasm to make it happen. Add to this our shared commitments to Scotland and it was easy to see why this partnership felt like a great fit from our first meetings.
Central to our partnership with Aberlour has been a donation of Microsoft software and IT expertise to enable dramatic improvements in their efficiency, freeing up staff time to work with greater numbers of vulnerable children. The key projects include:
· Implementing a customer relationship management system to support record keeping and better record capture outcomes for children. This enables service improvements, best practice sharing and more effective influencing of policy issues.
· Use of management information for informed decision making, improving tenders and applications for funding, enabling better responses to the complex needs of children in care.
· Improving communication, enabling smarter working practices, reducing costs and improving efficiency for Aberlour’s 700 staff across 48 sites.
In the first year of deployment, Aberlour have made savings on travel expenditure of £120,000. They will also save £15,000 on IT maintenance systems over three years. The improved operations have also contributed to Aberlour winning £700,000 of new funding for service provision.
As well as the technology-enabled transformation that is at the heart of the partnership, we’ve also been bringing our people together through volunteering and fundraising. Since our first steps together in early 2010, we’ve been able to:
· Train Aberlour staff, enabling them to provide internet safety training to safeguard approximately 6,000 children
· Engage 40 Microsoft employees in six different volunteering activities at Aberlour
· Organized fundraising balls and Christmas Giving Tree gift collections.
In October this year our partnership received fantastic recognition when we pat on the back. We were awarded the Corporate & Trusts Award at the Institute of Fundraising Scotland Awards Dinner. In their submission, Aberlour highlighted the direct impact the partnership has had on the services they provide to children:
· Increase in the number of children and families Aberlour can work with and better reporting on the impact on their lives
· Increase in the number of services for children by increasing the number of successful tender and funding applications
· Increase in staff time spent with children and parents given smarter working practices and increased IT efficiency
· Increase in the sharing of best-practice information and guidance both internally within Aberlour and externally to other charitable organizations and partners and stakeholders particularly in relation to key childcare policies
· Demonstrated increase in staff skills through a reduction in support requests and an increase in IT training delivered to staff
· Reduction in costs in terms of staff time, travel, procurement, deployment and maintenance.
There’s some healthy rivalry with our Microsoft colleagues south of the border (in England), which is why winning this award for our work in Scotland is just that bit more special.
We won’t be resting on our laurels though. We have further work to do on the new technology deployment. And we want to build on the depth and range of contact between our organizations, supporting Aberlour’s continued success, and continuing to build team strength and staff morale at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Bob McGonigle as Santa to deliver presents to Aberlour’s Bankfoot service