Case

Driving Cats Protection’s success through managed support

Building on top of previous projects with Cats Protection, Conscia's managed support offering helped ensure that the charity is able to make the most of its investments and continue driving organisational goals.

Cats Protection is the UK’s largest feline welfare charity, helping an average of 157,000 cats and kittens every year. Since it was first formed in 1927, the charity has rehomed over 2 million cats, and helped many more, surviving war and recession thanks to the dedication and commitment of employees and volunteers. Today, in addition to the flagship adoption centre and administration offices in Chelwood Gate, Sussex, Cats Protection comprises a network of over 210 volunteer branches, 130 retail shops, and 34 adoption centres.

Cats Protection has already put substantial time and effort into ensuring the networks and systems across its organisation are resilient and secure. Conscia has worked with the organisation on multiple fronts, helping to facilitate their ongoing strategy to migrate to the loud, enable security by design, improve support for third-party integrations, and become fully mobile enabled. With new network infrastructure in place, Cats Protection now wanted to ensure that they are making the most of their investment, using new features and insights to their full potential, and have support available to help manage and continually improve their service.

The challenge

• With over 100 sites nationwide, the Cats Protection team was stretched, and often only able to react to issues reported by individual staff or volunteers. The team needed centralised, proactive support to identify issues quickly and accurately, from experts who understood their network.
• Due to the network upgrades designed by Conscia previously, Cats Protection had the potential to access more data and gain much greater visibility of their systems. However, the team needed support to manage and filter this wealth of data in order to accurately diagnose and efficiently resolve the problems identified by automated alerts.
• As a charity with income predominantly stemming from donations, Cats Protection wanted to ensure that they were maximising value from their existing investments, and accurately plan, prioritise, and budget for future projects

Outcomes

• Through its managed support offering, Conscia works as part of the Cats Protection team: providing proactive monitoring of the network, and expertise on hand should a problem arise.
• Improved visibility of the network extends to connectivity issues, security threats, problems with individual devices, and more. With such rich data available, the team can review systems at specific sites to ensure optimal performance.
• With automation of firmware upgrades, standardised hardware across sites, and detailed insights, any issues can be resolved quickly and efficiently, minimising network downtime.
• Regular, detailed reporting not only ensures that active cases are investigated and closed quickly, but also provides insights into trends across time. This enables the Cats Protection team to identify sites with recurring poor network performance and plan for any required upgrades, continually improving service.
• Flexible engineering resource from Conscia empowers the Cats Protection team to plan their time and seek extra support when needed.
• Access to software licensing usage data enables Cats Protection to forecast licence usage requirements, allowing for more accurate budgeting and ensuring optimal value is achieved.
• Periodic commercial and service performance reviews ensure that the Cats Protection network maintains the highest quality standards, and support the team to continually drive towards strategic goals.

The Cats Protection team is now confident that they have the time, resources, and support needed to proactively manage and develop their digital strategy, continuously improving the user experience across their sites nationwide.