UCEA

About The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA)

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) provides members with timely advice and guidance on employment matters pivotal to the higher education (HE) sector. As a membership organisation its mission is to represent, negotiate for and promote the interests of UK HE organisations as employers to all stakeholders.

To do this effectively the association anticipates the challenges of
changing times. With membership across the UK’s diverse HE sector UCEA needs to be networked, well informed and influential and also to provide seminars, training and networking events for its members.

Lack of integration

Matt Lloyd, Head of Business Support, explained: “We realised that our existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and website Content Management System (CMS) were behind the times, were not suited to our needs and did not fully integrate with our other software systems, such as finance and events.”

UCEA also recognised that it needed external advice and support in terms of selecting and implementing a new CRM and website CMS. Having shortlisted two consultancies to provide that support, UCEA selected Hart Square.

Understanding requirements

Matt Lloyd said: “Hart Square came in, arranged and facilitated a series of workshops with our entire team, scoping and understanding our requirements for both the CRM and website CMS. They did a real drilldown into the organisation, from top to bottom, looking at what we do in detail, and more importantly what we needed to do to improve our processes.”

With a specific focus on UCEA’s finance, membership and events teams, Hart Square produced a business requirements’ report. “This synthesised into a ‘mega requirements’ document, looking at where we needed to make changes to our processes,” said Matt Lloyd. “This then fed into an Invitation to Tender (ITT) document for both CRM and CMS vendors.”

Keeping vendors on track

Hart Square was involved in helping UCEA to shortlist suitable vendors. “We went from 12 to 6 vendors. Hart Square organised for each vendor to present to us and they attended every meeting. In the end we selected an integrated solution from C2 Software for both the CRM and CMS,” said Matt Lloyd.

He continued: “Hart Square were very helpful, they kept both us and the vendors on track. They made sure we kept to the script and didn’t go down any blind alleyways, and crucially they challenged us to think differently. They were also a hard task master to the vendors, ensuring that they kept to the brief and then chased up any missing information.”

Knowledge and capacity

“Even though I’m technically minded, I have many other things to do, likewise the rest of the team are very busy and not many have CRM experience,” said Matt Lloyd. “Hart Square brought the knowledge and capacity that we don’t have - their sector experience was really helpful to us. They know exactly what membership associations like us are looking for and they pointed to the group of suppliers for both CRM and CMS that best fitted our requirements - otherwise we would have wasted a lot of time and money.”

With a final decision on both the CRM and CMS made in July 2018, Hart Square was invited to help UCEA with the implementation and to support the association’s newly appointed project manager. UCEA is targeting go-live for summer 2019.

Better service for members

Matt Lloyd explained the benefits of the new CRM and CMS: “This was very much a member-first project – it’s all about providing a better service to our members. Our website is our window on the world, so we want to provide members with easy access to our services, wherever they are, and to more personalised content.”