Cutting Costs, Jargon and Admin!

The Social Enterprise Academy provides transformational learning and development programmes for people and organisations working for social change.

The Academy helps people to develop themselves, their teams and their organisations to create sustainable businesses and have greater social impact. Programmes support organisations at all stages and focus on four key areas; leadership, enterprise, social impact measurement and personal development.

Through its Social Enterprise in Education programme, the Academy has supported over 1,000 schools across Scotland to set up pupil-led social enterprises and, since 2016, has been working internationally, with 14 hub teams now established around the world supporting social change throughout communities.

Challenges

Social Enterprise Academy employs 10 staff, based in Scotland and internationally, who rely on mobile phones to do their jobs. However, the situation with their previous mobile phones provider was fragmented and becoming onerous.

Paul Dunlop, Finance Manager explained, “The contracts we had in place had grown organically, with people due upgrades at different times, varying costs and different contract end dates.  There was also no sharing of data so one colleague’s bill could escalate one month, while others weren’t using much data atall. It was something we were aware we had to look at as we knew we could be saving money and improve the process.”

Assessment and Recommendation

Following a direct introduction to Social Enterprise Academy Chief Executive Officer Neal McLean, Paul got in touch with the GoodCall team, explaining their objectives to spend less and simplify the process – “We looked at their website and could see they were a natural fit for us, especially being a social enterprise”, he said. GoodCall went on to audit the Academy’s existing set-up, analysing their bills and analytics.

Paul commented, “It was so easy for us – they basically logged into our mobile phone billing remotely, analysed our spend and then came back with quotes – two different options, what it would cost and what we needed to do next.   It was essentially a simple three-point plan compared to the jargon we’d been given by the more corporate phone companies we approached.

“Also, the other companies we obtained quotes from were going to buy us out of our existing contracts, meaning a hefty price added on at the end. Instead, GoodCall went on to recommend a total of 10 mobile lines and handsets, with six currently in place and four to follow when the remaining contracts are up for renewal, again saving on costs.”

The main benefit for Social Enterprise Academy, their main objective, was to save money. GoodCall initially managed to provide a hardware fund of £2,258 towards buying new handsets. The Academy then saved monthly costs on their out-of-bundle spend, as this was previously too high, and managed to half their monthly contract costs.

Paul added, “Per phone, it’s basically half the price of what we were spending and we’re seeing substantial savings on our mobile phone bills already.  It was also a huge attraction to us that GoodCall is a social enterprise, a ‘like for like’ situation.  It made the decision easy and we just move each person’s phone as and when their contract runs out.  It takes the headache away. We’re also so impressed by their friendly, ‘can do’ attitude – they’re really straightforward to deal with and the personal service just makes everything so much easier, giving us time to focus on our core objectives than struggling with admin and complex jargon.”

You can read more about the work of Social Enterprise Academy on their website.