Hyphen8 Highlights of 2024
This year has been....
Not gonna lie, this has been one of the tougher years at Hyphen8. In an uncertain economic and political climate, we have sadly seen charities that we support shut down due to lack of funding or having to make budget cuts.
At the start of the year we had to make the difficult and emotional decision to downsize the team to a more sustainable size. We didn’t want the pressure of generating more sales over-burdening our staff. While this was a tough choice, it was necessary to safeguard the business and the work that we do.
BUT nobody wants to read a blog filled with doom and gloom! As I reflect on the past year, despite the challenges, there is a lot to celebrate. So I want to share some of the things that have made me very proud of our achievements this year.
Our People
I am proud to say that we have continued our mission to make Hyphen8 a positive place to work:
- More employees are now working flexible hours to suit their home lives including reducing to 3 and 4 day weeks or working a 9 day fortnight
- We continue to review our policies and introduce new ones – this year we introduced a Menopause policy and invited experts to come and educate us on this important topic
- We re-structured the team to introduce a new level of line managers to create promotion opportunities for those interested in honing their management skills
Resourcing and managing multiple teams and projects in unpredictable times is a huge test of character (to put it mildly). So I must give a shout out to Ange and her delivery leadership team Julia, Tamara and Vai who have done a fantastic job of this! It's been a busy year, we have worked on over 50 very varied projects for nonprofits as well as providing ongoing system support to 97 nonprofits though our evolve service.
Our Impact
We do what we do because we want to make a difference by helping the nonprofits who put their faith in us. So it's EXTREMELY important that we know what our impact is! It's rewarding to see the wide variety of projects the team has been involved in over the past 12 months for nonprofits doing such fantastic work.
This year we continued our journey towards becoming a B Corp and have reached the interview stage! It was inspiring to attend their Louder than Words conference with Jenny Sowerby (who is doing a fab job of leading our application) to mingle with like-minded companies trying to do the right thing.
We have also engaged a professional Impact Story Teller to speak to our fabulous customers. It brings joy to my heart to hear how my team's work is transforming the way they work and enabling them to do more good. They are coming in thick and fast but see links below to 3 of our most recent stories.
Our Innovation
Our CTO Dan and his merry band of developers have been busy bees this year leading to the development of a shiny new set of solution accelerators to add to our ever-growing range. As part of our social purpose, these are offered licence-free. Configured using native Salesforce and compatible with any data model, they fill gaps cost-effectively. This year's include:
Form Flow - Simplifies the set-up of multi-page data capture forms in Salesforce including field-level validation message management
File Tree - Complete control to create and organise document folders to store, search and filter files related to each record in Salesforce
Event Management – A simple event management solution to set up events and invite guests to register online that can be further configured to meet any further requirements
We have also been excited to get involved in investigating and setting up AI assisted processes for a couple of our customers. Too early to share news on those yet but watch this space...
Our Wellbeing
Let's face it, the role of a consultant is stressful at the best of times. Given the year that we have had it has become so important to embody two of our values 'Support each other' and 'Don't forget to have fun'.
Our team has started a new morning group check in call this year so people can connect and shoot the breeze.
We had a two-day Summer Social where we forgot about work and focused on play!
This year we were delighted to defend our title for a second year by winning Best Salesforce Partner to Work For at the Digital Revolution Awards. This is partly thanks to our wellbeing programme providing time, support, finances and perks to look after our staff.
Thank you to my amazing team and to all the nonprofits who continue to put their faith in us this year. I am looking forward to a couple of weeks off before we start again with Chapter 1 of 2025.
Elaine Forth, CEO
