How digital transformation helped this company scale up its operations amid Covid-19

Getting pancreatic cancer is like a death sentence. Only 10.7% of people live past five years after being diagnosed with the disease, making it one of the cancers with the lowest survival rate.

This lethality prompted one of Australia’s leading liver, pancreas, and biliary surgeons, Dr. Mehrdad Nikfarjam, to launch Pancare Foundation in 2011. The organization’s aim is to raise money for patient support programs as well as to fund research in pancreatic and upper gastrointestinal cancers. Research into these cancers are among the lowest-funded across the world.

Toward the end of 2019, Pancare’s leadership team decided that the organization needed to boost its fundraising efforts to accelerate the progress of its cause. But to do that, it would need to significantly scale up its operations with the help of technology.

A “traditional” business

At the time, Pancare used only basic technology: a website, a customer resource management software, and other simple tools.

“It was a very traditional, not-for-profit model with labor-intensive and manual operations,” says the foundation’s CEO Doug Hawkins.

Pancare Foundations CEO Doug Hawkins at a fundraising event in 2019. / Photo credit: Pancare Foundation

Like most charity organizations, a significant portion of Pancare’s fundraising efforts relied on face-to-face interactions or physical events, which people would pay to attend. Such events were often metropolitan-based, making it difficult for patients or donors living in other parts of the country to attend them.

To step up its ability to raise funds and help patients and carers, regardless of their location or profile, Hawkins says Pancare needed to “work smarter” and set up new collaboration technologies and tools.

Going digital

Pancare’s digital transformation began with what Hawkins calls a “redesign of strategy.”

“It started with a business requirement and a definition of what we wanted to achieve in the next 10 years, but with a focus on the next three,” he says. “That led to defining the objectives of our key programs and fundraisers, which then led to finding out what technology, what tools we needed to help enable that.”

These discussions led Pancare to seek out various tech vendors, including information and communications technology firm NTT Cloud Communications (formerly known as Arkadin). The tech firm’s cloud communications services helped provide video conferencing capabilities for Pancare’s internal use, as well as for engaging with its market.

“[NTT was] really core to helping us understand how to configure, manage, and set up our tools to improve communications,” explains Hawkins.

Adapting to a new normal

The decision to pivot into a more tech-reliant business couldn’t have come at a better time for the foundation: While Pancare was taking steps to digitize its processes and operations, a pandemic was already brewing, and it would soon change the way people work.

Luckily, by the time Covid-19 was in full swing, the organization had already integrated technology that would allow it to survive in the current work-from-home economy.

Photo credit: Annie Spratt / Unsplash

“We always intended pre-Covid to set up tools that would enable us more agility and flexibility in terms of the way we work,” says Hawkins. “The ability to run video-conferencing calls was done to help us be more flexible, but now, that’s become mission-critical with Covid-19 and everybody working from home.”

Equipped with digital collaboration tools such as cloud communications, Pancare was able to continue operations “without any major bumps in productivity,” Hawkins adds. It’s also been able to run its usual patient and carer support programs online via webinars and virtual meetings.

According to the CEO, these efforts have truly been a game changer for the firm.

Looking ahead

Pancare is still in the early stages of digital transformation, and despite its benefits to the foundation, the journey hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing.

“It was disruptive,” Hawkins recalls. “Many of us weren’t used to video conferencing or collaboration tools at all. It was an adjustment – culturally – in the way we work, and we had to do it quickly while rapidly transforming other aspects of the foundation.”

Although Pancare is barely a year into its digital transformation drive, Hawkins says there’s a unanimous sentiment that productivity has increased significantly across the organization. He credits this partly to NTT’s assistance in providing suggestions for organizational change management and adoption, based on how other companies – including NTT – use the same collaboration tools.

In the coming months, Pancare is looking to continue on its path to digitalization, with plans to enhance its social and web presence, integrate more customer resource management and data management tools, and even invest in marketing automation capabilities to enhance productivity and improve on its stakeholder experience.

“There will definitely be challenges because [using automated marketing tools] will be a big change in the way we communicate with our market. But by going down that path, we’ll create efficiency, and that’s what we need to be able to scale,” says Hawkins.

To learn more about NTT’s suite of cloud communications products and services, visit its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.