Technology solutions and partners: Grant management

Mark Luckins
Principal Consultant

Mark advises senior leadership teams to help them navigate the world of digital technology. He helps charities and third sector organisations determine the right digital, data and technology strategies to enable their mission. In his career, Mark has held various technology leadership roles and has achieved numerous certifications (ITIL, CISSP, PRINCE2, MCSE); academically, he holds a degree in “Operations Research” (better known today as ‘data science’). He helps charities grow the right organisational capabilities to support their current strategic priorities as well as generate value in the longer term. He advises on the specialist staffing and suppliers required to deliver as well as staff and SLT skills more widely. Mark often acts as a fractional “digital technology director” advising senior leaders on digital transformation agendas, major technology investments or simply how to make data and technology provide more value. Mark also regularly helps our clients to kickstart innovation or major new projects, or conversely to turn around stalling or failing change processes. Mark has extensive experiencing working across third sector organisations including marketing, fundraising, beneficiary/member service provision and corporate (finance, HR, IT/facilities). Mark has worked in large international charities (Plan International); the public sector (Houses of Parliament); small international charities (Marine Stewardship Council); UK charities (Crisis) and the education sector (ICAN). He managed teams of over 30 and has built teams from scratch. He has delivered major multi-million projects (CRM, website and data architecture) as well as smaller projects; and he is regularly involved in innovation and helping to save money and reduce overheads. He prides himself on providing commercially realistic, rightsized advice appropriate to the maturity of the organisation.

Libby
Principal Associate Consultant

"I chose a career in the sector because of its focus and ethos. As a consultant, I'm fascinated by the range of charities I work with and the opportunities to help organisations and people be more successful in what they do."

Libby specialises in helping organisations with project governance and programmes of change. She has a post-graduate diploma in voluntary sector management from Cass Business School, is a PRINCE2 project management practitioner, an MSP (managing successful programmes) practitioner and an Agile Project Management practitioner. She develops strategies and business cases, leads on project governance, coaches and mentors project managers and teams, and provides quality assurance and project reviews. Libby helps organisations achieve successful IT projects with activities such as business processes analysis, requirements identification, software selection and implementation. She works with organisations to achieve efficiencies and improvements in operational areas. A former senior manager with Sayer Vincent, Libby has extensive experience of the not-for-profit sector. She has worked with a wide range of clients including British Horse Society, Christian Aid, Crisis, Enham Trust, the Football Foundation, I CAN, RNLI, Sue Ryder Care, the Vegan Society, WAGGGS, Womankind and World Animal Protection. Before joining Sayer Vincent, Libby held several senior roles within charities, primarily international aid and development organisations. Libby is a member of the British Computer Society, The Chartered Institute for IT, and formerly was an advisor to the third sector project management forum. She has previously been a volunteer and trustee of a small charity that carried out holidays and other activities with disabled and socially disadvantaged children.

"Libby Hare was the consultant that we worked with on our IT change project. We achieved the change needed and our goals were met in an appropriate timescale."

Liz
AI Safety and Data Protection Associate

Liz Curry began her career working in theatre publicity, spending 10 years at the National Theatre in various marketing roles. She worked briefly with the UN on the first Mozambican General Election and travelled through East Africa before joining Comic Relief, where she was involved in a variety of projects. Liz became Comic Relief’s first CRM Manager in 2002 where she was responsible for the development of the role, including process analysis, design and implementation of all fulfilment processes for the Red Nose Day and Sport Relief campaigns: streamlining the process to efficiently delivery hundreds and thousands of pieces of print materials. She also redesigned the way gift aid was processed, winning Information Age’s Most Effective Use of IT in a Charitable Organisation 2007, in recognition of claiming £7.5m worth of Gift Aid from Red Nose Day donors and won the Grand Prix: Most Effective IT Project 2007. She mapped out a better way of income reporting during campaign, identified bottlenecks, redundancies and inefficiencies and engaged stakeholders to understand areas for improvement, then instituted a system of daily income reporting to SRT. She was later appointed Business Planning and Processes Manager with specific responsibility for designing new business processes around the introduction of GDPR. The programme won the Best GDPR Programme and Grand Prix winner in DataIQ’s Talent Awards in 2017. Liz is now an independent consultant and associate consultant with Adapta. Her current clients include Wood Green, The Animals Charity, The Hugs Foundation and Livewire Consultancy (as Data Protection Officer); The Mercury Theatre, Colchester (working with the Marketing team to redesign processes and hit their targets) and Be the Business. Past clients include: Barnardo’s, Marie Curie, Versus Arthritis, The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, and We Are Family, the adoption charity. Other awards include: Marketing Week’s Data Strategy Award for 2013; Data IQ’s Real Mail Marketer of the Year in 2013; and the 2013 IoF Insight in Fundraising Award for Innovation; and the IoF Insight in Fundraising Award for Driving Strategy in 2012. She was also named in the DataIQ Big Data 100 list for three years running. Liz became a member of the IDM/DMA’s Data Council in 2014 and is a member of both the DMA’s Governance Committee and Fundraising Forum (and occasional chair of webinars).