Supporting Sustainable Coastlines with IT services as they scale
“With Brightly, we found a business with really good ethical values and sustainability credentials, as well as a team who were able to support the kind of business needs that we have.”
About Sustainable Coastlines
Sustainable Coastlines Charitable Trust exists to connect people to nature and inspire change. Through large-scale clean-up events, educational programmes and public awareness campaigns and activities, they support and inspire communities and schools to prevent litter and restore waterways, right throughout Aotearoa.
Founded in 2009, Sustainable Coastlines has grown to a team of around 20 full-time staff, as well as six interns. While most of the team are based in Sustainable Coastlines’ ‘living building’ flagship Education Centre in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, they also have staff working remotely from Nelson, Wellington and Christchurch.
“As a charity we run three programmes, one is litter clean ups and that’s our core kaupapa; it’s where we started - big events, beach clean ups and education around litter, specifically litter impacting the ocean. From there, we’ve evolved into another programme of Citizen Science, where we enable volunteers all around the country to own a patch of beach to monitor it and look at the types of litter that’s washing up there. We also run a riparian planting programme, working with communities on biodiversity restoration alongside rivers, and supporting those groups in understanding what the river needs to improve the health, life force and vitality of the ocean,” explains Sustainable Coastlines CEO, Josh Borthwick.
A flexible IT support solution
Josh joined Sustainable Coastlines mid-2020, and not long after reached out to us for support in managing the charity’s IT needs.
“We were of a size where we probably couldn’t afford a full-time tech person, but we use a lot of technology and tools and need constant support. The outsourced model has worked well for us with other services, and we wanted to do the same thing with our IT”, Josh says.
The Sustainable Coastlines team had been managing their systems themselves, in a way that Josh describes as ‘pretty adhoc’.
“We’d been operating as a bit of a pirate start-up for a decade, so lots of cool stuff was getting done, but we were at a point where we needed to get better systems in place. It’s one of the challenges when you’re bootstrapping and growing. It’s not that things were broken, but there were on-going efficiency problems with the management of files and the potential for security issues, so it was an approach that was obviously not something we wanted to continue,” Josh explains.
We stepped in to provide on-going IT support, resolve networking issues, ensure their systems are operating securely and to create cohesion across their suite of platforms.
“We've got a really good support relationship, helping us with managing our technology well and making it a seamless system. Brightly are set up to do things remotely; if a problem comes up, they're really good at scrambling and finding a solution. They are ingrained into our Slack channel, so it's really easy for the team to just reach out and go, ‘Hey, I'm having this problem, can you help out?’ That virtual tech support feels quite seamless, like they are just a part of our organisation.”
When it came to choosing an IT partner, it wasn’t just capability that mattered to Sustainable Coastlines.
Ethical alignment
“As much as we can, we try to align ourselves with the best ethical option when it comes to partnerships and suppliers. So for us, finding a partner with the capability to support a small organisation on an ad-hoc basis was important but then the alignment with our kaupapa and Brightly’s ethos around environmental and social issues was a win,” says Josh.
Sustainable Coastlines benefit from our reduced-rate impact partner pricing, a discounted rate we offer to Sustainable Business Network impact investors, social enterprises and, non-for-profit and B Corporation members.
“Partnering with Brightly gives us a level of scale-ability, without having to invest too much in infrastructure and the wages and costs of doing it ourselves”, Josh says. “And I think for a charity, it's particularly important because we're always trying to manage the cost of our core operation, versus the cost of having the impacts that our funders want. So, that outsource model really helps us in keeping costs down, but still having a good level of sophistication and service”.
Being able to support the mahi of an organisation like Sustainable Coastlines matters to us, too. As well as our impact partner discount, Sustainable Coastlines is one of the charities we support with regular donations through our partnership with One Percent Collective, and we’re proud to get our team involved with beach clean-up initiatives.
We love the fact that as well as addressing some very specific challenges Sustainable Coastlines take a systems-based approach to environmental impact. The Sustainable Coastlines team are a talented and passionate group of people and its inspiring to work alongside them.
Discover more about Sustainable Coastlines, see their upcoming events or enquire about hiring their Flagship Education Centre at www.sustainablecoastlines.org