Cambridge Community Arts
Cambridge Community Arts helps to build connections and confidence for adults with mental and/or physical health conditions. They run art courses in a range of subjects including music, visual arts, photography, and creative writing. The creative learning garnered from these courses enables beneficiaries to achieve and believe in themselves. Results are impressive, with 75% of beneficiaries noting their mental health improved.
Cambridge Community Arts had ambitions to grow their offering to more beneficiaries. However, they recognised that they were being held back by fragmented information storage systems which was burning up considerable staff time and reducing their capacity to expand.
Using grant funding from The Fore, they have implemented a streamlined new centralised data system (Salesforce). The results have been transformational, enabling the organisation to scale up. The new database is already leading to a fundamental shift in organisational efficiency (scoring 80% against the relevant target). New-found staff time is allowing them to focus on increasing the courses on offer and to expand to more beneficiaries across wider geographies (scoring 100% against the relevant target). In the last year, they have ‘never delivered so much’, working with 362 beneficiaries in the academic year (that hadn’t yet ended), in contrast to 300 beneficiaries in the previous full academic year. Seeing the transformative impact of their new system, they now plan to utilise it to strengthen their fundraising capacity to increase financial resilience.