Modern solutions for modern problems: Carers NZ's digital evolution

Carers NZ is a national not-for-profit organisation established in the mid 1990s to support New Zealand’s 1m+ family carers – those supporting a friend or family member who is frail, unwell, or has an ongoing health condition or disability.

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Carers NZ also has a role as the Secretariat for the Carers Alliance, which consists of 57 not-for-profit organisations nationally. Carers NZ supports a very large network of people and organizations and has a mailing list of around 80,000 but is itself a small organisation of just six full time equivalent staff. Functions include distributing information, advice and support to carers, running an 0800 helpline and maintaining an extensive social media presence.

The opportunity

The CEO of Carers is technology aware with a background as a technology business journalist, but the organisation is not large enough to warrant any in-house digital expertise otherwise.

The legacy situation with Carers in 2022 was a turnkey hardware and software solution for the digital infrastructure to support the business. This had been obtained some years before, in part due to cyber-security and information governance requirements in major government contracts held by Carers NZ.

While the solution was initially fit for purpose at reasonable cost, over time the service was starting to compare less favourably with more modern solutions.

Action became necessary when the provider announced “out of the blue” that its service was to be retired and gave just three months’ notice of termination of service. This prompted Carers NZ to engage with CIO Studio to identify a solution.

The challenge

Carers NZ CEO Laurie Hilsgen knew there was a need to change. Management sensed that they were paying too much for what they were getting. The challenge was to identify a complete replacement of hardware devices, telephony solution and cloud computing storage that would be more cost-effective and ideally more functional than what was being replaced. Since the Covid pandemic, staff were working from home more often and the solution had to facilitate good teamwork across multiple locations.

The solution

CIO Studio proposed a simplified solution based on Microsoft Office365 together with a combination of “bring your own device” (BYOD) and some purchased laptops installed in a secure zero-trust network.

Quotes from off-the-shelf hardware providers proved quite economical and this made the proposed solution viable. CIO Studio then sourced an implementation and on-going support partner - Theta Systems - to take on the detailed implementation work. 

Transformation

The CEO of Carers NZ could see that the solution could be “clipped together quite well with the right help, but we knew that we couldn't do that ourselves.” CIO Studio took responsibility for ensuring a successful transition, working with Theta, managing the relationship and dealing with any issues that arose while keeping close to Carers NZ to ensure satisfaction with the transition.

Says Carers NZ CEO Laurie Hilsgen 

.. it all went incredibly smoothly right down to the training that our new provider Theta gave our staff … it really has been quite seamless and painless. We're saving significant costs every month with the new approach.

One feature that was an easy solution technically proved transformational as well for Carers NZ’s community.  The organisation runs an 0800 hotline, and although email and social media interactions are common, many of the Trust’s clients are in a demographic who still like a phone call with a human being answering. The on-site PABX was removed and a mobile-only solution working with 2Degrees installed, alongside new faster broadband capability. The 0800 number was re-routed to a mobile phone that the manager of the helpline always carries, meaning calls are never missed during business hours.

Another innovation was bringing printing costs in-house using high-quality printers that created further direct costs savings and also reduced environmental footprint.

Benefits

As with all smaller enterprises, overhead costs of digital solutions are a major consideration. Carers NZ has made significant savings with the solution introduced by CIO Studio’s strategy, with costs being reduced to less than 30% of what was previously being spent. On top of that they have a more functional solution that better meets the needs of the organisation. All of this was achieved with remarkably little disruption in a comfortable timeframe.

In Laurie’s words:

”The whole thing from the first meeting where we started looking at what we had to do was probably three to four months. It was smooth and seamless. We could probably have gone faster if we’d wanted to, but it was a comfortable pace for us because we were able to apply for philanthropic funding to cover technology and project costs. This is always an important consideration for a charitable trust.”

CIO Studio effect

Carers NZ CEO Laurie Hilsgen highly recommends the CIO Studio approach for NGOs in the health and disability sector.

"The level of insight CIO Studio provides is just fantastic. Even if you have your own in-house IT department, I suggest getting CIO Studio to give an opinion - another point of view. The expertise that we were able to access from CIO Studio at modest cost made an enormous difference for us. Like anyone, we don't want to waste money or make a bad decision. With all the technology and cloud-based options out there, you need independent advice to get a fit for purpose solution. We were helped to make the right choices and have been away laughing ever since. There are plenty of other things CIO Studio can help us with, such as our massive CRM database, and we’ll be looking at that in the future as well."

Get in touch with the CIO Studio team to discuss how a systematic and tech-informed approach to digital transformation can help your organisation deliver the very best in patient care.