Macmillan: Building a foundation for transformation

Image source: Macmillan
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We can't rebuild what we don't understand

Macmillan’s Coffee Morning is one of the most successful fundraising events across the whole of the UK charity sector. In 2023, it raised more than £18m – enough to fund 288 Macmillan nurses for a year.

Ahead of a technology review of its core systems, Macmillan needed to understand the existing service from the perspective of internal and external users.

Steve Newstead, Head of Engineering at Macmillan said “We can't rebuild what we don't understand.” 

They also wanted to further upskill the organisation around service design and embed this way of working across other Macmillan services.
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Mapping the whole service to identify opportunities

Macmillan had already conducted a customer journey mapping project which identified key pain-points and ways to improve the Coffee Morning experience for hosts. However, there were still some gaps in their knowledge, especially around issues caused by internal systems and processes.

Services are rarely delivered by single teams. Knowledge about a service can be embedded across multiple areas of an organisation. This can result in teams being unaware of how their work impacts customers, as well as expertise not being shared outside of team siloes.

Mapping a whole service therefore can’t be done in isolation. We led collaborative workshops to involve as many Macmillan colleagues as possible. In the end, more than 40 stakeholders across 12+ teams contributed to mapping Coffee Morning.

We worked as one blended team to create a service blueprint that represents the whole service experience: what the end user sees and does, their interactions with Macmillan throughout their journey, as well as everything that happens behind the scenes (the people, processes, and systems that enable Coffee Morning to be delivered).

We did this to help identify short and long term improvements and to make strategic decisions. 

By collaborating on the Coffee Morning blueprint, we drew on the organisation's in-depth knowledge and expertise, whilst maintaining an eye on the big picture.
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Fundraising services need to evolve with new technology and social change

From the outside, it’s hard to imagine that this profitable fundraising event runs on legacy technology. Although not a blocker, these old systems and consequent manual workarounds have a direct impact on the user experience. 

For example, timings and details around thanking fundraisers can directly impact their likelihood of future participation. Legacy systems make it easy to get this wrong.  

Complex legacy systems also prevent services from scaling. Macmillan Coffee Morning is 34 years old this year. Over time, it’s evolved to enable people to organise their events in a way that works for them, rather than only once a year on the ‘official’ Coffee Morning date. People now host events throughout the year at home, work, school or community spaces. Some create personalised themed parties or even do it fully online.

Charities need to continuously adapt to these new user needs and technologies. For fundraising services, it means thinking about the impact of local bank branches closing down and the multiplication of digital payment methods. 

What used to be a fairly simple task: organise an event, collect cash and hand it over to the bank, can now feel more difficult or confusing for Coffee Morning hosts.   

We found that more could be done to nudge people towards using digital payment options rather than the traditional method of cash and paying-in slips. 

Through ideation, we challenged the perception of must-haves vs nice-to-haves, like the personalised ‘thank you’ certificate sent by post. As more people organise their events and donate online, there could be an opportunity for thank you certificates to be digital by default. This way, they could be received immediately, while Coffee Morning supporters are still on a high from hosting their events.
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Embedding service design in the company culture to create sustainable change

Our work created a shared vision and roadmap to deliver immediate and longer term improvements to the Coffee Morning service that will drive innovation, reduce risk, create efficiencies, and result in better experiences for fundraisers and staff. 

Ultimately, the aim of the project was to create sustainable change and to promote user-centred service design methodologies beyond Coffee Morning. Together we devised an approach that could be replicated across other services within Macmillan.

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Steve Newstead, Head of Engineering at Macmillan, said: “Healthia helped us to go deep into the detail of how Coffee Morning is delivered, whilst also simplifying that complexity to identify future opportunities to improve the service. The blended Macmillan and Healthia team identified and prioritised pain points and developed specific ideas to improve key parts of the service. They helped challenge our thinking and supported us to embed new ways of working.”

Amie Slade, Customer Journey Manager at Macmillan said: “Healthia brought valuable service design expertise, working hand in glove with lots of Macmillan colleagues to build on our customer journey mapping work. We identified further pain points and ideas to improve the Coffee Morning experience for customers and staff alike. We look forward to using what we’ve learnt about service design techniques to help us map other services in the future.”