Wow what a year 2020 has been in so many ways. It’s been such a time of uncertainty for most businesses so I am incredibly pleased to share such positive highlights for Hyphen8 from the past 12 months.

We have grown our customer base

We have added a further 23 nonprofit organisations to our ever-growing list of inspirational customers that trust us to design and support their Salesforce solutions.  

Many of these are funders that needed tech solutions set up super-quick to award grants. Over £500m of grants for Covid-19 projects have been processed using solutions designed and built by us.  Many of these projects have been successfully delivered during lockdown including Comic Relief, Community Foundation for Wales and Education Endowment Fund.

Our team has grown

Our staff count passed the 20 milestone this year as there are now 22 of us in the Hyphen8 team and we are still growing! 

I am so proud of our team and our diversity of skills, experience and personalities!  

We have succeeded in living up to our value to support each other this year as we have faced the same challenges as any organisation trying to get through lockdown. Sadly we haven’t been able to meet up physically, as we are all based in different locations around the UK (we haven’t even met some of our newer team members in person!)  However, we have made up for it by trying to keep each other motivated with silly weekly themes and making each other laugh.

We have a new Director

I was delighted to appoint Dan Probert as a Director of Hyphen8 earlier this year.  

Dan has been such a positive influence over the past few years helping to shape the way we do things and growing and transforming our business.  It’s important to me that Directors share the same vision and values and can support and challenge each other in equal measures and I really couldn’t wish for anyone better than Dan in this role.

Grant management thought leadership

We have had the opportunity to further boost our position as thought leaders in the grant management sector.  

In the summer, Salesforce announced plans to deliver a roadmap of grant management product development.  In recognition of our expertise and experience, we are super proud to be the only UK Salesforce partner to be part of the group invited to contribute to the ongoing product design.

Angela Murray, our Head of Impact and Development launched our new Service Design practice to help nonprofits to create services that are accessible and work for everyone.  The service has been incredibly popular and we have so far had the privilege of helping a number of funders to adopt best practice and introduce more user-led processes.

We became a Gold level Salesforce Consulting Partner

We recently reached the dizzy heights of Gold level Salesforce Consulting Partner.  

There are lot of achievements that contribute to these levels and the one that means the most to us is our Customer Satisfaction rating (current average 4.9 out of 5) that demonstrate one of our key values to take pride in what we do.  

Partner Navigators are consultants recognised by Salesforce for their expertise and record of customer success and we have attained the highest level of nonprofit cloud with 4 specialisations.

We have refreshed the Hyphen8 branding

I can hardly remember life before our superstar in-house Digital Marketing Consultant Jonny! 

Since joining us in April, he has given our brand identity a complete redesign.  We have a new logo, new website and a completely new set of templates (and a pretty cool set of Christmas graphics this year – I mean, why would we not?).  

Our new Digital Marketing Service was launched to help our customers to enhance their user experience with design of web pages, data capture forms, email templates, Community portal templates and help setting up Pardot campaigns.

We have made a real difference

One of our 8 key values is to Make a Difference and we did this in a number of ways in 2020.   

Of course, we hope that we make a difference every day to nonprofits by helping them become more efficient to increase their impact.  As we celebrated our 8th anniversary this year, our Pledge 8% initiative has been a key focus:

• 28 nonprofit organisations have received pro bono time from our team this year – from training to refreshing web to implementing accelerators where budgets were stretched – we do what we can to help 
• Hyphen8 donated over £1800 to our favourite charities as part of our annual staff donations match funding scheme
• Our innovative team of developers added to our range of solution accelerators including dynamic help, dynamic checks, enhancements to our finance batch export solution and a new decision meeting module

We grow closer to achieving our goal of setting up our own charitable foundation to award grants to the causes that are important to us.

We rewarded the team with a well-being programme

Without knowing quite how important it would become this year of all years, in January, we launched a new staff well-being programme that has evolved throughout the year.  

Our people are what makes us successful so we place huge importance on making sure they are supported and do what we can to look after their mental and physical health.  

• A monthly well-being allowance. This can be spent anything from indoor plants, to gym membership, to bike hire, to massages or anything that helps us to feel better
• Additional time off if your birthday falls on a week day, a quarterly learning day dedicated to study or research and extra holiday allowance the longer you have been a part of the team
• Flexible working hours to accommodate the challenges of child care during lockdown
• I have shared 40 weekly well-being blogs with my team on a wide range of weird and wonderful topics which has certainly helped me get through the year. zingtoday.co.uk 

The whole team is looking forward to getting some well-earned rest this Christmas having had one of our busiest years ever.