Civil Society

The Civil Society Sector, as we define it at Z/Yen, spans charities, membership bodies, educational institutions, health trusts and other third sector organisations. Z/Yen is heavily committed to this sector; a significant part of Z/Yen’s business is deployed in the sector. Z/Yen people tend to be highly experienced in and personally committed to our Civil Society work.

Z/Yen has developed a Not-For-Profit Risk Management Framework based on its risk/reward methodology, Z/EALOUS, which is of particular use to Civil Society organisations when undertaking strategic planning exercises, information systems studies or when reviewing the effectiveness of functions. Z/Yen people are skilled at using strategic planning, project management, systems design quality standards and contract management methodologies. In practice, these tools vary from assignment to assignment, but the Z/EALOUS methodology remains consistent in each type of assignment and in each type of organisation; risk and reward can be defined in terms of the objects of the organisation and the objectives of the assignment.

A few highlights of Z/Yen’s recent work include:

• Designing and building new online communities within some of the UK’s biggest Civil Society organisations, for example enabling real time financial and membership data gathering and sharing, enabling powerful research information while saving huge amounts of manual effort, at local and national level.
• Utilising predictive tools and techniques that have demonstrated, amongst other things, value in income growth and fundraising effectiveness – for example, helping one of the UK’s largest membership organisations to increase membership retention and membership income by millions of pounds over several years.
• Working as long term partners of Charity IT Leaders, to run their dynamic benchmark, with in depth analysis of IT costs, development and priorities of some of the UK’s largest charities.
• Leading research into evidence of worth for Civil Society, and developing proven approaches to help organisations gather and demonstrate their own evidence of worth.
• Advising and helping to create joint ventures between Civil Society organisations, such as CharITyshare, an award winning IT shared service organisation that met and exceeded its three-year cost saving targets within a year.

Publication of IT for the Not-For-Profit Sector, a practical guide to IT strategies for the Not-For-Profit Sector.