Annie Lord is Head of Operations at The Reader in the UK. Over the last few years, that position switched around a bit as the company did. They’ve always done a lot of outreach: organising reading rooms for people to share literature together. They read in prisons, drug and rehab centres, they read with dementia patients, with children and young people, … A big shift happened when they got their own building at Calderstones.
The Reader is a unique organization and has its own special building. Annie tells us all about it: “Five years ago, we got our beautiful mansion house. It’s an 18th century Edwardian building that is now our international headquarter for the charity. We had big renovations and a little under two years ago, we started using it. My roll was helping to bring that house to life, thinking about the best and most efficient way to run it. Before, we had always used other peoples spaces or libraries or the community centres they run and we just had a room in there. Once we had our own building, it was the first time that we had our own space that we needed to take ownership of. That’s how I got involved with Yesplan, because obviously we needed a room booking system to manage our 24 rooms. I was responsible for the roll out of Yesplan and making sure it worked for us, so setting up the system and writing those fields to represent exactly what we need.”
Because The Reader is not a very typical Yesplan user, it was really important for us, the Yesplan team, to understand what they were looking for. Annie explains: “We worked with your team to figure out what you could do for us and what kind of data we would need to capture. Your follow-up and the support has been great. You always helped me when I was trying to process the system and think through practicalities and you invested in trying to understand who we are and what our needs would be in certain situations.”
“We had our direct training and we learned about managing our data in a way that works best for us. We then started setting up the system as part of that process and made it more specific along the way. The moment we felt like Yesplan was almost totally set up, we as an operations team, then rolled out a series of training sessions and drop-in workshops for the staff where we helped people sort out the basics of Yesplan. We held one every two weeks and staff could just come along if they needed help, advice or specific access for example.”
When The Reader opened Calderstones, they realized that there was plenty of stuff they needed and there was a lot of pressure on Yesplan to deliver that. “Yesplan became our core system that seems to connect a lot of things together and without it, our work at Calderstones cannot be operationalized. That’s why I find it crucial to really celebrate the system and empower the staff to understand the importance of Yesplan because without it, it falls apart”, says Annie.
“We've kind of really tried to master the categorizations and use of the individual datapoints of entry and really tailoring them depending on what profile people are selecting. This has been really key to be able to separate and categorize the work that we do. For some of our shared reading work, it's also really important that we make sure that we have fields around reporting: who is leading this group, who is responsible for reporting back about how many people attended this group because a lot of our groups aren't ticketed, they're just community groups and for free.
This has enabled us to put this in a language that our staff and volunteers understand. It allows us to mold and shape the system so that we can capture the data that is most valuable for us. The flexibility to build and write these fields and to make them flexible to our profiles and reactive to what's been selected is important.
“Yesplan has supported this broader thinking of what data we need to capture and report on. This way we can make sure we celebrate achievements across the organization”
- Annie Lord
Annie ends with a very positive note: “Yesplan has supported this broader thinking of what data we need to capture and report on, on site at Calderstones. This way we can make sure we celebrate achievements across the organization: the fact that we've had this many events or this many people that attended,... “
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