A technology transformation for The National Lottery Community Fund carried out in partnership with managed cloud services provider iomart meant staff were ready to distribute millions of pounds of vital funding during the Covid pandemic.
The Fund is one of the non-departmental public bodies responsible for distributing National Lottery funding to good causes and is the largest funder of communities in the UK. iomart’s consultancy team has spent the past three years working with The Fund’s Director of Technology and Data, Matthew Green, on a project to redefine its technology and infrastructure. The aim was to digitally enable everyone in the organisation to deliver funding where it was most needed as quickly as possible.
Matthew Green, Director of Technology and Data at the Fund, led the project. “The Fund has distributed over £500 million of National Lottery and funding from Government since lockdown began in March 2020, which would have been incredibly challenging to do with our old systems,” he explained. “Thanks to the partnership with iomart, we have enabled our colleagues to get vital funds to the communities that need them.”
There were a number of different aspects to the transformation project. A Microsoft Surface Pro device was given to every member of staff as part of a Windows 10 refresh. Email was moved to Exchange Online and a number of other Microsoft 365 technologies were adopted. Multiple on-premise infrastructures were consolidated into a single hyperconverged stack using Nutanix HCI and connectivity was improved with the introduction of a Software Defined Network from Silver Peak and physical firewalls from Barracuda.
The value of the transformation became acutely apparent as the Covid-19 crisis began. By the time the Government announced the first nationwide lockdown, the Fund’s 850 employees were already working from home, ensuring funding reached charities and community organisations fast. Staff were able to collaborate online, sending and receiving over 4 million emails and holding almost 1000 calls and meetings using Microsoft Teams every day
Nick Martin, director of consulting for iomart, explains, “Our expertise in optimising the user experience as well as introducing new technologies enables us to help organisations like The National Lottery Community Fund to improve their effectiveness.”
Matthew Green agrees. ““We’re no longer hampered by our technology, we’re enabled by it. I’m incredibly proud of the members of the Technology and Data team at The National Lottery Community Fund, who are no longer simply the fixers of broken things; they are the strategic technology architects for the organisation.”
