"It has revolutionised the way that we work as an organisation.”
Precious Counselling and Mentoring is a Community Interest Company in Enfield offering integrative counselling, holistic mentoring and advocacy for adults, children, young people and families.
They support emotional wellbeing, confidence-building and access to services across community settings such as schools, GP surgeries and youth services.
Meet Naomi
Naomi, the Project Officer at Precious Counselling and Mentoring, was involved from the very beginning of the database project, starting when the organisation was still using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their data.
Working closely with Alice from Superhighways, she attended regular meetings to define what they wanted the new CRM system to do, map existing processes into Airtable, and learn step by step how to building and adjust the database.
I just have to shout out Alice, because she’s been absolutely phenomenal from the idea and the conception of it to where we are today.
The digital challenge
Before working with Superhighways, Precious Counselling and Mentoring were heavily reliant on clunky Excel-based systems to manage almost everything: client information, contractor invoices, referrals, feedback and reporting.
Data lived in multiple spreadsheets that didn’t “talk” to each other. On top of this, the spreadsheets offered no alerts or workflow support, and data security and GDPR were also concerns.
While Naomi and some staff were comfortable with basic spreadsheet use, not everyone had the skills to fix or maintain them, making the organisation dependent on the few confident users.
There were also paper referral forms that arrived incomplete, requiring staff to chase missing information.
This fragmentation created a lot of time-consuming admin, increased the risk of errors and missed clients, and made it difficult to get a clear picture of what was happening across the service.
The manual workload of preserving the data in this way was quickly becoming unsustainable. Precious Counselling contacted Superhighways to develop a more streamlined, reliant and fit-for-purpose system.
We didn’t want to have to bend the organisation to fit the CRM. We wanted the CRM to be able to fit us.
How Superhighways helped
Superhighways introduced Airtable as a flexible solution and began working with Naomi and the team to move from cluttered spreadsheets to an integrated database.
Alice first spent time understanding how the organisation actually worked, and what their needs and constraints were. From there, she helped them imagine what a better process could look like and worked with them to shape a database around their real workflows.
A big part of Superhighways’ support was guiding the team step-by-step through the fiddly bits: turning old, inconsistent spreadsheets into usable, structured data and showing them how to organise information so it was clearer and more accurate.
Superhighways also supported Precious Counselling and Mentoring to streamline key processes, making them more workable for a small team and their contractors, and reinforcing the value of having systems that fit their ways of working rather than the other way around.
The results
I honestly think that Superhighways has made this a success for us. I don't think we would have had the confidence to build how we use Airtable to what we do today. [...]
We don’t need to ask Superhighways ‘please help us’. They’ve given me the learning to be able to rectify issues and do some of that troubleshooting myself.
Superhighways’ support has transformed how Precious Counselling and Mentoring works day to day.
What was once a fragmented set of spreadsheets and paper forms has become a much more coherent way of managing clients, contractors and projects.
Staff no longer spend disproportionate time chasing invoices, re-entering data, and hunting through files; instead, information is easier to find and act upon. The new system has also reduced the risk of people “falling through the gaps”.
Now, the team can see at a glance who is being seen, how often, and where follow-up is needed. Moreover, contractors have clearer processes for recording their work, and the organisation has better oversight of hours delivered and engagement patterns.
What I'm most proud of is that everyone in our organisation is able to use it irrespective of their learning needs, irrespective of their abilities, irrespective of their competency levels [...] It feels very inclusive.
They also have a much stronger story to tell about their impact. Being able to more easily see trends, totals and outcomes has made it more possible to back up funding bids and reporting with more robust, quantative evidence.
Finally, Superhighways’ approach has built lasting confidence and skills within the organisation. The support has not just improved a single database, but it has modernised their ways of working, allowing them to focus on the tasks that truly need attention.
A year on, they've continued to refine the Airtable database, with Naomi stating that, overall, Airtable continues to positively shape and improve the way they work.
This has changed our lives or changed the company's lives for the better [...]
You've got to commit to the process and trust that there are better and other ways to do things. Just because it's not broken doesn't mean it doesn't need to be fixed.
Visit Precious Counselling and Mentoring to find out more about their services.
About Realities of Poverty
Realities of Poverty is a data literacy programme led by small charity digital, data and technology experts Superhighways and funded by Trust for London.
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