Helping The Prince's Trust

Earlier this year, The Prince’s Trust embarked on a brand new partnership with the UK’s leading compliance and risk management business, Alcumus, in order to streamline its health, safety and compliance management procedures. With the help of Alcumus’ innovative software solution, Info Exchange, The Prince’s Trust was hoping to free-up valuable time and resource, allowing the charity to focus on its core commitment to giving young people practical and financial support.    

Andy Griffiths, Head of Health, Safety and Safeguarding at The Prince’s Trust, commented: “We decided to partner with Alcumus as our in house processes needed updating in order for us to continue empowering and safeguarding young people. It was important for us to work with a company that fully understood our ethos and could support us on an ongoing basis, rather than simply providing an ‘off the shelf’ product.”

Modernising systems to improve services
Prior to adopting Info Exchange, The Prince’s Trust didn’t have an in-house system, with the majority of its internal processes being paper based.  This caused work duplication, pro-longed working methods and an inability to review data. Andy added: “We were quickly outgrowing our old procedures and required a modernised system that enabled us to share data and gain a deeper understanding of any incidents that occur. What’s more, the increased access to data helped the team to bring into focus where we needed to improve; high level conversations are now happening far more often, improving our safeguarding services.
“This had a positive impact on developing responsibility and ownership amongst our employees” says Andy: “It’s easy for people to think their responsibility ends when they fire off a paper based form, however, adopting a web-based system, changes people’s mind-set and makes them think differently – they know their contributions can impact ongoing improvements and feel a part of that process.”

A Trusted Source
Another challenge The Prince’s Trust had was around the strength of available data. On occasion, this impacted on the charity’s ability to demonstrate its work.
Commenting on the improved access to data, Andy says: “The quality of data available previously was really challenging, meaning we weren’t able to showcase the great job we do.  We also couldn’t easily identify what caused particular problems, so rectifying this was challenging. Info Exchange has completely transformed this, allowing us to download a range a quality data, which gives the team a better chance of preventing future problems and allows us to clearly demonstrate our work.”

A big part of the charity’s function is safeguarding young people from incidents and harm, meaning there is a moral and legal responsibility to ensure those in its care are looked after. The Prince’s Trust is dedicated to continuously improving this service and has found that Info Exchange has allowed the charity to completely overhaul the reporting process. The new system helps the trust to collect far more vital information and, therefore, picks up on a lot more issues facing thousands of young people. Furthermore, the broader team are supported with an automated email notification to alert them when a new problem has been uploaded, ensuring nothing is missed and that young people get the support and guidance they need.

Internal reactions and business benefits

Bringing a new system into a company that has used the same paper-based processes for 40 years can be challenging, however, Info Exchange has been a welcomed member of the team. “The software is very highly regarded and plays an integral part of the team’s work”, says Andy: “We expected some initial teething problems as staff learned how to navigate themselves around the new dashboard, however, these quietened down much more quickly than I had predicted”
With Info Exchange’s new schedule reporting system, Andy has been able to save around one day per month in admin time, as it will automatically generate comprehensive email reports, rather than Andy and the team creating these manually.  What’s more, it allows staff to structure their own consolidated reports, giving the entire company confidence in the system.

Overall Info Exchange has totally improved The Prince’s Trust’s internal systems and practices, allowing them to continue safeguarding young people, prevent accidents and improve health and safety as a whole. Commenting on the implementation, Andy says: “It’s honestly been a massive game changer. Both adopting the new system and partnering with Alcumus; it’s changed the charity for the better.  The work we do here at The Prince’s Trust is so vital and depended upon by thousands of young people, so it’s imperative that our systems can continue to support and protect them.”

Alan Neill, Senior Vice President of software Solutions at Alcumus, said: “We were delighted to help The Prince’s Trust improve their internal health and safety processes. They help so many people around the UK, saving lives, empowering and inspiring young people and offering training programmes. It’s really fantastic to hear that our system is helping this to continue. The amount of time wasted in companies and organisations around the UK due to inefficient processes and duplicated workload is astonishing, which is why Info Exchange is always so well received as it dramatically reduces this wasted time and improves productivity. I’m sure I speak for everyone at Alcumus when I say I look forward to continuing our special partnership with The Prince’s Trust and hope we can continue helping them in the extraordinary work that they do.”