The Education and Training Foundation
An In-Depth Technology Audit for The Education and Training Foundation
40+
Staff participated in review
33
Actionable recommendations identified
Categories
Membership, Charity, Consultancy
View Project
The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) is the workforce development body for the Further Education and Training sector. A registered charity, their role is to commission and deliver professional learning and development for teachers, leaders, and trainers to support government policy and meet sector needs.

Through their professional membership body, the Society for Education and Training (SET), the ETF also provide a suite of additional benefits and qualifications to their 20,000 members, and they are the largest professional membership organisation dedicated to practitioners in the post-16 sector.

The ETF recently completed the first phase of a 'digital transformation' programme, which focused on two key areas – migration from a legacy 2011 Microsoft Dynamics-based CRM to cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the implementation of a new integrated SET membership website.

While important, these improvements focused on a small part of the ETF’s extensive digital estate. In order to understand how technology could enable their next organisational strategic plan, the ETF sought to explore how they could enhance their ways of working, seeking to both refine their internal staff experience and significantly improve the experience they offer to members and customers.
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DISCOVERY.
This project, sponsored by the Director of Professionalism and Customer Experience, was one of four critical organisational projects within the ETF.

In order to identify the ETF’s strategic goals, we ran a series of workshops to better understand their ambitions and gain an appreciation of how each system contributes to the overall experience.

Technology should act as an enabler for strategic aims, and it was critical to gain an understanding of the internal user experience in terms of how staff use technology and whether the existing systems were fit for purpose. We organised a set of interviews with senior staff across departments to understand the challenges that were preventing them from achieving their goals.
ESTABLISHING A BASELINE.
Alongside understanding the ETF’s key systems, audiences, and management processes, key staff were also asked to complete our Digital Competency Framework survey to establish a baseline and identify where digital skills and process gaps exist.

The framework explores areas such as customer experience, digital marketing, insight, risk, content production, and product development, and enables the production of a detailed set of recommendations outlining how existing resourcing and processes could be evolved to better serve organisational objectives. Like many organisations, the ETF were keen to ensure that they continuously improve and that they are able to measure the impact of that improvement to their customers and members.
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THE RESULT.
A detailed recommendation report, system analysis, and a three-year roadmap were developed to enable the ETF to enhance both its internal and external experience, through the development of people, process, and technology.

With this understanding of activities, ETF are also now able to plan staff and financial resources required to deliver a change programme.
We engaged with Cantarus to undertake a comprehensive strategic review of our technology to help understand our ‘As-Is’ position and help us identify what our ‘To-Be’ position should look like and how to get there. It was notable that Cantarus’ team included a number of former senior executives from other membership organisations whose knowledge and understanding of our challenges really shone through. We were delighted with the breadth and depth of Cantarus’ review; they actually went significantly outside the original scope, also considering people and process alongside technology, to ensure the highest quality of result. Their work has set the scene for ETF to deliver an ambitious and transformational member-centric digital roadmap over the next few years.
Martin Reid, Director of Professionalism and Customer Experience
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