“It’s almost like moving from one aircraft carrier to another”: Inside the National Trust’s sweeping digital transformation

The National Trust is Europe’s biggest conservation charity, boasting around six million members and serving customers at hundreds of sites littered across the UK.

Founded in 1895, the Trust has dedicated itself to preserving nature, biodiversity, and historic sites the length and breadth of Britain. But while it may have been launched in the twilight years of the 19th century, it’s by no means a relic of a time gone by.

In recent years, the Trust has undergone a rapid period of digital transformation, overhauling legacy IT infrastructure and systems to help the organization maximize the use of data and cultivate closer relationships with customers in a digital age.

Jon Townsend, CIO at the Nationa Trust, sits down with ITPro to explain how the organization focused heavily on overhauling its network infrastructure, which had fallen short of modern standards.

Ageing IT infrastructure also placed a major strain on the organization while clunky applications severely hampered workforce productivity. All told, this was a three-pronged approach for the National Trust, focusing on networking upgrades, cloud migration, and transforming it into a data-driven organization.

“When I started looking at how the National Trust was set up from a technology perspective, I mentioned that we have 500 major sites, but at the time we didn’t really have a network that joined everything together,” he says.

“We had challenges around using old legacy equipment in physical data centers and end-user services that weren’t really fit for purpose. So what I set about doing was thinking ‘How do we rebuild this and redesign it from the ground up?’

“And quite literally from the ground up, we had to start digging fiber optic cables in a lot of our places because it just didn’t exist. A lot of our places are in very remote locations.”

In some instances, Townsend says staff at sites were trying to operate on broadband ADSL links capable of a meager half megabit. Given some of these locations saw up to 400,000 visitors a year, the impact on workforce efficiency was significant.

No simple lift and shift for the National Trust

Years of iterative expansions to data center capacity meant the National Trust’s systems had become cumbersome and lacked the power efficiency required for modern operations.

“We had about 1,000 hosts in two data centers, all built on infrastructure we owned,” he explains. “Some of it was virtualized, some of it was physical hosts, some of it was a bit of both.

“What had happened over the years is things had become a spaghetti-type architecture,” Townsend adds. “I think that’s quite common, we’d had that data center in place for well over a decade, and it had become a bit of an entangled mess to be honest.”

The National Trust was faced with two choices: begin modernizing its in-house infrastructure, or embark on a cloud journey. Reflecting on this period, Townsend notes that cloud was “still quite a new thing” for a lot of organizations, especially in the non-profit space which has traditionally lacked the financial resources to embark on widespread migration projects.

Townsend explains that the National Trust worked with both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate its existing infrastructure, as his team was keen to adapt workloads for the cloud rather than simply lift and shift.

“So we redesigned the architecture underneath it to make it cloud-fit, if you like, and it really allowed us to fast forward into the future and made our infrastructure ready and fit for purpose.”

Part of this cloud journey included the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) tools, and the organization selected Microsoft 365 as its go-to suite of solutions. This allowed the National Trust to adopt a remote work model in 2020 when the pandemic hit, a feat Townsend said would otherwise have been a monumental challenge.

Maximizing the use of customer data

With its digital foundations laid, the National Trust looked to capitalize on its transformation by ramping up its customer engagement capabilities. It’s here that the organization began its now close relationship with Salesforce, Townsend explains.

Initially, the Trust implemented Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack in a bid to streamline the processing of its memberships. This saw the tech team migrate from an “outdated Oracle eBiz system” that Townsend says was “no longer fit for purpose and was holding us back as an organization”.

The benefits became clear very early on, according to Townsend, and prompted the organization to ramp up its adoption of Salesforce services. This included looking at overhauling how National Trust members could purchase or renew memberships via Salesforce, as well as embracing Experience Cloud to improve supporter engagement.

The organization also worked with independent software vendors within Salesforce’s ecosystem including FinDock, a native Salesforce payments app that the National Trust uses to process donations payments. At this time, the UK was emerging from repeated lockdowns and the National Trust was keen to tap into the trend of Brits looking to get back out and embrace nature.

“There was a real appetite for that, especially coming out of the pandemic,” he says. “We found that people wanted to reengage with nature because for the first time, they weren’t allowed to. That fear of separation was really painful for a lot of people.”

A National Trust campaign that saw it give free passes to sites across the country proved a roaring success, Townsend says, and Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Platform helped the organization raise valuable insights into the raw appetite among Brits hoping to get back into the countryside and to historic sites.

Prior to adoption, these granular insights would not have been possible, and the Trust may have missed out on a sizable pool of potential customers.

“But of those, we found that 41% of them actually signed up to hear more from us, to get that marketing. So that meant 450,000 people that had never really engaged with us before, but now we were able to bring in as prospects to actually hear more.”

A more personal customer experience

Establishing a clear, overarching view of a customer, their appetites, and preferences was the ultimate goal here – Townsend notes that customers can easily be turned off a business they’ve subscribed to if they feel it is too impersonal.

Townsend says that through Data Cloud, staff at the Trust now have a clear view and understanding of a customer’s preferences.

“Our members, they’re the lifeblood of our organization,” he tells ITPro. “We have almost six million of them, but many of them are also the people who buy things from our shops, they buy food at our food and beverage outlets, they go on holiday with us, they may donate to us.

“They might actually be volunteers or members of staff. And so really understanding all of those different relationships for the first time, we can really build upon that.”

Achieving this “single view” of the customer wasn’t a cut-and-dry process, Townsend notes. This was a huge undertaking given the sheer scale of data at the Trust’s disposal.

The National Trust boasts a staggering 100 million records, each of which paints a picture of a customer and their relationship with the organization. Shifting this from one environment to another was a huge task for the small yet capable data team.

“When we were doing the digital transformation, we had to pause, for example, direct marketing, because we were shifting from one platform to another and we were moving all of our data sources,” Townsend explains.

“When we were doing the digital transformation, we had to pause, for example, direct marketing, because we were shifting from one platform to another and we were moving all of our data sources,” Townsend explains.

He tells ITPro that the stakes were high during this process, as the organization had to ensure its member direct debits weren’t affected by the move. From a legal, financial, and customer experience, the timely and accurate handling of payments had to move forward like clockwork.

“It’s almost like moving from one aircraft carrier to another one. We had to take off with those direct debits in flight for six million folks, and then land it perfectly in the space of one month.”

Worker benefits and the future of the National Trust

The primary focus of this long-running series of projects was to improve customer experience. But Townsend adds that as with any digital transformation project, an equally important goal was to streamline daily workflows for staff.

Measuring success here, Townsend says the response has been “overwhelmingly positive”, as in-house teams and the partner organization that handles supporter services no longer have to juggle multiple systems.

“They were having to take supporters through journeys that would require them to hit 20-odd different screens as they were going through that. To have all that on a single interface was transformational for them, as all of a sudden they were able to rapidly respond to customer needs.”

Looking ahead, Townsend tells ITPro there’s much more on the horizon for the National Trust, especially in the age of AI. Having laid the foundations to become a digitally literate organization, further enhancing staff capabilities and improving customer service is a tantalizing prospect.

There will be challenges here, not least in ensuring safe and responsible AI use and ultimately ensuring that the data used in any project is clean. It’s here that Townsend sees the real value of Data Cloud.

“The key thing with any implementation of AI is getting your data sorted out, and that was the fundamental building block,” he says. “And one of the reasons why we selected to go with Data Cloud.”

“For the first time, we’ve got all of our support data into one place and will provide us the platform to then place AI on top of it.”

Salesforce unveiled its Agentforce service at Dreamforce 2024, which allows users to create autonomous AI ‘agents’ capable of carrying out tasks on behalf of human workers. Regarding this specific service, Townsend says he’s “super excited” about the prospect of AI agents working alongside human workers in the future.