Scottish Seabird Centre Soars with New Tech Upgrade

The Scottish Seabird Centre is a conservation and education charity and visitor attraction in North Berwick which opened in 2000 and offers a five-star visitor experience with something for the whole family, whatever the weather.

It welcomes around 270,000 visitors annually and offers a gift shop and café which are open to the public, a ticket admission Discovery Centre with interactive live cameras on the Firth of Forth Islands and seasonal interactive boat trips to the islands. A heavily seasonal attraction, this means the Centre needs to manage very intense periods of visitor activity, and as a charity Gift Aid donations by visitors are also a key part of income generation. The Scottish Seabird Centre keeps growing, and plans are currently underway for it to evolve into the National Marine Centre within the next two years having successfully secured a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

As a self-funded charity, the Scottish Seabird Centre must carefully assess where money is spent, but its existing IT systems were in urgent need of an upgrade. They had become unreliable, liable to break down and were unable to provide the visitor data the Centre needed for marketing and forward planning. The current systems were unable to process Gift Aid donations electronically, meaning a lengthy form-filling process for staff and visitors, while the existing membership system was unable to provide effective reporting on individual member spend and behavior or cater for
a more secure photo ID system.

Vennersys implemented our comprehensive CRM solution alongside a new integrated admissions system, EPoS system, and Gift Aid collection functionality to help provide a visible breakdown of income streams. Plus, the CRM provided the centre with customer behaviour data to facilitate pro-active marketing and resource planning.