WSPA

Company Profile

WSPA is the world's largest federation of animal support organisations, with a growing network of over 600 member societies in more than 130 countries. WSPA has 13 offices and hundreds of thousands of supporters worldwide.

United Global Movement

With consultative status at both the United Nations and the Council of Europe, WSPA is building a united global animal welfare movement to further our vision of a world where animal welfare matters, and animal cruelty ends.

WSPA supports and implements animal welfare programmes. These typically incorporate elements of campaigning, educational work and/or direct aid.

Its work is focused on four priority areas:

• Companion animals
• Commercial exploitation of wildlife
• Farm animals
• Disaster relief for animals

WSPA's Strategic Plan

WSPA works to prevent the suffering of the individual animal and its long term Strategic Plan builds upon the strong foundation laid down during WSPA's first 50 years of operation. This aims to harness the energies of the global animal welfare movement in response to major challenges to animal welfare.

Business Situation

WSPA has been a client of Compsoft's for over ten years, and during this time Compsoft has implemented a number of different systems covering many areas of the charity's business.At any one time, WSPA runs multiple projects all around the world. These may range from short-term emergency projects such as dealing with homeless zoo animals in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan, to long-term projects such as getting bear bile farming outlawed in China. WSPA's existing way of updating the rest of the organisation about what was taking place on these projects was through a regular newsletter. However, this approach had a number of drawbacks, such as:

• Project newsletters were only published once a month, so news either had to wait, or be published in "extra alerts" that were time consuming to produce
• News updates came through a single person, meaning that they could become a bottleneck if other high-priority work arose
• Although some of the information relating to projects was stored in a back-end database system, this system was incomplete and unintuitive, meaning that the majority of WSPA staff could not access it directly if they were in need of information. It was also only accessible to London WSPA staff
• Newsletters by their nature were long and therefore only partly relevant to each person reading it
• Photograph sets relevant to a specific projects were managed by a different department and had to be requested from that department directly.

Technical Situation

WSPA wanted to implement a solution that would enable them to redefine the way they stored, updated and informed staff about project information. Specifically, WSPA's goals were:

• To have all staff directly update their own projects, thus freeing up one full-time employee for work elsewhere in WSPA
• To implement an intelligent searching mechanism to enable users to query information themselves, quickly and accurately
• To allow staff to customise their own lists of "favourite" projects, and to then be informed when these projects were updated
• To incorporate relevant project photographic sets into the system.

Solution

Compsoft implemented a brand new bespoke system built using Microsoft .NET technology. The solution was entirely web-based, enabling users and administrators alike to access every area of the system purely using an Internet browser. As the system was designed for use over low-bandwidth connections, all WSPA staff, no matter where they were in the world and whether they were using broadband connections or just dial-up, were able to update their own projects in real-time.

With direct synchronisation between the Media Management System (an Equinox-based application which holds project photographs) and the new Projects Database enabled through a custom-developed Web Services implementation, users are now able to immediately preview thumbnails of all available images and obtain medium-quality image files. If they wish to get high-resolution pictures, they are given a unique reference number for each image which they can then refer to when ordering images from the photographic department.

Benefits

Key benefits realised by WSPA as a result of implementing a new Projects Database through Compsoft included:

• The saving of one full-time position; not only have WSPA removed a potential bottle-neck in the updating process, they have also been able to re-deploy a member of staff to a different area of the business
• Because WSPA staff update their own projects, this has led to a real sense of ownership from the staff themselves; as a result, staff are more likely to update their own projects more frequently and in greater detail, meaning that the quality of information is much greater
• WSPA is frequently asked by various media sources for their comments and views on various international events. Having rapid access to up-to-date project information has improved both the quality and timeliness of WSPA's responses

Compsoft is proud of its long standing relationship with WSPA. Initially WSPA used a Delta database followed by an Equinox solution prior to taking advantage of internet technologies that is enhancing the organisation's data management. If you would like to find out how Compsoft's data management and bespoke application development expertise can help your business, please contact us.