YMCA Trinity Group

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YMCAs are predominantly known for their accommodation settings and YMCA Trinity is no different, with somewhere in the region of 450 beds available for young people who don't have anywhere else to live.

Alongside this service, they also run a number of smaller projects. This includes five childcare settings across Cambridge and Suffolk, youth focused work in the community, working with families where there is Child or Adolescent to Parent Violence and Abuse (CAPVA), health and wellbeing gyms, and a mental health services team.

Their mental health services comprise of overarching strategic development with other statutory services to carry out preventative work; training and upskilling professionals, teachers, parents, delivering webinars to parents, teaching teachers around mental health. 

Topics they cover include, how to support young people, how to support themselves, classroom strategies, and behavioural work, all of which is preventative in nature. 

The clinical work is around getting clinical support to individuals or to groups of individuals. That work is done through going into roughly 50 schools with 35 therapists across that region. Additionally, they have gyms to support physical health and emotional health and the Cresset Centre in Peterborough and Queen Anne House in Cambridge.

Increasing Pressure on Data Management

With a rising number of referrals and a rising number of therapists, they recognised that they needed to maintain high quality record keeping and administration. Previously, the team relied on spreadsheets and tracking through spreadsheets, and it reached a point where they needed a better system, both in terms of being able to record, and in terms of being able to report on what they were doing.

As an organisation with a wide geographical reach, having Charitylog as a single source of information that could be securely accessed via a web browser was also a critical requirement.

The selection process took around four months for YMCA Trinity Group to identify that Charitylog was the right system for them. During this time their approach was heavily influenced by feedback from colleagues from other charities. With a number of options available, it was through word of mouth from those with personal experience of using Charitylog that reassured the team that Charitylog would meet their needs.

The Team at YMCA Trinity Group had a healthy appreciation for the scale of the task of implementing a new CRM into their existing workflows, processes and to their team members.

New Possibilities Are Presented

Prior to implementing Charitylog, YMCA Trinity Group understood that having a cloud based CRM would help but the feedback has been that it wasn’t until they actually started implementing it that they truly grasped how large a positive impact it would have.

Being able to have schools input directly via web forms, referrals into the charity, management of, and access for therapists weren’t simply additions or improvements to their existing processes. 

The new possibilities opened up fresh conversations about why existing processes were set up in particular ways, what could be made more efficient. Implementing Charitylog provided a positive reason to question the status quo and to ensure processes were robust and clear.

The Importance of Implementation

Having that clarity proved to be one of the keys to making the implementation successful. Having started off as being overawed by the extent of what Charitylog could achieve, it gave them a roadmap to ensure everything down to the basics could be achieved.

With the whole implementation taking place during the pandemic, and with the YMCA Trinity Group team split between Oxford, Huntington, and Peterborough, that meant all collaboration, training and support took place over Microsoft Teams. A process which the team reported worked incredibly well. 

Beginning with a full day, with some initial ideas about the structure, the lead on the project appreciated being able to collaborate directly with one of the Charitylog implementation consultants to customise the system to their requirements.

They described this process as starting with the existing framework and structure within Charitylog and inputting their language and workflows and by the end of it having something they recognized as their YMCA clinical processes.