Case Study #2
Breast Cancer Haven
Breast Cancer Haven approached Daily Bread Consultancy in relation to our business development services. A national charity with five cancer support centres throughout England, Breast Cancer Haven supports people affected by breast cancer.
The charity recently (April 2019) appointed a new chief executive, Sally Hall. Sally has the task of improving the financial viability of the charity and increasing the impact that the charity has for its beneficiaries.
BACKGROUND
When your world has been turned upside down by breast cancer Breast Cancer Haven provide personalised support to help put lives back together.
Formed in the year 2000 Breast Cancer Haven has grown to provide breast cancer support to 1000’s of women each year via 5 breast cancer centres. However, with changes to the fundraising landscape, the charity’s staff team, and increasing associated costs Breast Cancer Haven is now in a position where it needs to adapt to secure its future.
THE PROJECT
Breast Cancer Haven enlisted the support of Daily Bread Consultancy in May 2019 to undertake a benchmarking exercise and to help provide business development and strategic direction for the charity. The purpose of the exercise was to look at the charity as a whole and determine where improvements and efficiencies could be made.
Numerous areas for improvement were identified with a focus on infrastructure and communication challenges as a priority to work on.
Daily Bread Consultancy continues to work with Breast Cancer Haven and has been responsible for infrastructure changes:
- Writing a tender process and executing, to significantly reduce the expenditure on IT services
- Reinstating the charity’s Google grant
- Project managed a move to cloud based (Office 365) systems to enable flexible homebased working
- Design and build a new website to improve functionality and reduce costs
And communication changes:
- Significantly increasing web traffic from 86,256 (2019) to 136,342 (2020)
- Project managing the charity’s first TV direct response advertising campaign
- Producing a new impact website to highlight the impact of the charity
- Implementing a range of measuring tags on the charity website to gain greater insight into the behaviour of site visitors.
- Using data from measuring tags to inform new web content and to improve engagement with service users.
THE PROCESS
The bench marking exercise started with an in-depth all staff survey, followed by interviews with team leaders, service users, and other stakeholders.
The data was analysed and a detailed 52 report was produced with a list of 104 recommendations and suggested priorities. This fed into a strategic exercise and 5 year plan document.
Staff were included in decision making regarding infrastructure changes to ensure buy in. This improved moral and provided an opportunity to explore processes and training needs.
Working with Google, the charity grant was re-instated and traffic to the site increased. Search term data such as “breast pain in menopause” enabled us to improve web content that met the specific needs of web visitors.
Measuring on site video views, scroll depth on key landing pages, information pack downloads, contact from completions and phone calls provided evidence of need and contributed towards a stronger case for support.
WEB TRAFFIC INCREASE
58.7%
RECOMMENDATIONS MADE
Major infrastructure changes
5
Testimonial
“As the new CEO for Breast Cancer Haven I wanted a clear picture of the organisation. I needed to know how effective our IT infrastructure, fundraising and communications were.
I invited Daily Bread Consultancy in to review these functions, deliver a benchmarking report for the organisation and support with business development.
The information and support provided was detailed, insightful and invaluable.”
Sally Hall CEO – Breast Cancer Haven