Executive Summary
The Mill does not primarily have a CRM problem. It has a collection of operational journeys: rooms, volunteers, activities, communications, partners, evidence, grants and finance, that have grown across separate tools, spreadsheets, folders, forms and individual working practices.
Read the full report →The Mill does not primarily have a CRM problem.
It has a collection of operational journeys: rooms, volunteers, activities, communications, partners, evidence, grants and finance, that have grown across separate tools, spreadsheets, forms, folders and individual working practices.
The problem is therefore:
Approve this as an operating-model programme, not a CRM procurement exercise.
The response is deliberately incremental and uses low-cost specialist tools where they already solve the problem well.
Serve more people, organisations and activities, use The Mill's assets more effectively, increase earned income and produce better evidence without administration increasing at the same rate.
Digitisation must preserve what makes The Mill The Mill:
The programme's decision rule:
Change where the benefit is material and sufficiently broad. Connect where an existing specialist process already works. Intervene where governance or risk requires it. Otherwise, leave it alone.
This means the programme is not proposing:
The three rooms are the first proof because they combine:
“The room books itself” means routine requests can increasingly proceed through self-service within rules and authority already established by The Mill; unusual or consequential cases still go to people.
The same pattern later extends to volunteers, and to Network Organisations and organisation-owned membership.
Rooms first for implementation. Volunteer scheduling early for exploration.
Website publishes. Applications transact. Mailchimp markets. Finance accounts.
Plinth remains one possible candidate for broader volunteer, Network Organisation and impact capability; LemonBooking or another commodity service may prove sufficient for scheduling.
This is a working technology hypothesis subject to bounded pilots, not a committed procurement package.
Individual ownership without organisational dependency.
This becomes a programme-wide test:
Can a suitably authorised Number 2 take over without the Number 1 being available?
The same principle extends to volunteer scheduling. The system may identify appropriate and potentially available volunteers; it must not imply that people are automatically allocated to work.
Availability means “you may ask me”. Acceptance means “I have committed”.
The organisation knows the state of the rota; the coordinator does not have to remember it.
Administrators and lead users should progressively become:
AI helps them explore, analyse, draft and test low-cost improvements. It does not independently change permissions, policies or organisational authority.
Can two ordinary users independently complete the essential tasks?
Overall discipline:
0–6 months, Prove Rooms, runs a parallel discovery activity: define and sandbox the volunteer availability / service-match journey. Then, 7–12 months: select and pilot the simplest suitable volunteer scheduling approach against the sandbox requirements.
Volunteer contribution: approximately 2½ days per month, with suppliers and operational owners undertaking routine implementation and operation.
The difference is capability, not licence cost.
The full report contains detailed cost assumptions and a resilience reserve.
The cumulative effect of the programme is that The Mill progressively develops a dynamic authorised profile of itself. Not a giant central database. Instead:
Single authorised versions of important facts, presented through different purpose-appropriate views.
The future experience:
The customer describes the need. The Mill presents the best authorised match.
For example, somebody looking for an accessible room for a particular activity should increasingly be matched to the appropriate space without needing to understand The Mill's internal administration.
Why this matters for evidence: normal operations increasingly demonstrate:
This supports trustee assurance, organisational learning and funder/KPI evidence without building a separate reporting bureaucracy.
KATLAS has explored the longer-term architecture internally under the working title CommunityHubCierge; it is a future-state design reference, not a recommendation or part of the 24-month implementation.
The same twelve recommendations as the full report, in the same order and meaning, shortened for a quick read.