How Anthony Nolan restructured in response to the data problem its growth had created.

You are in an SLT meeting where the management accounts show fundraising spend that should be converting but is not. The CEO asks you to run through the discrepancy. You do. But it’s not an answer you’re happy with. You know the fundraising team is performing, but you cannot easily reconcile what they spent with what they generated - income tracked in one system, activity data in another. 

Or you have just run a CRM audit and found the same major donor in four places, each with a different relationship history, and none of them complete. You realise every team that interacted with that person recorded their own version of it. No one was wrong. But no one has the full picture, and you are the one who has to produce the board report based on it.

You start solving this by treating it as a data quality problem. A CRM problem, perhaps. But it may be neither, because this piece is for the moment you start to suspect the problem is not in your data, it is in the fact that no one person owns the complete picture.

Anthony Nolan is the UK's stem cell and bone marrow register. Founded in 1974, by 2016 it employed 300 staff across donor recruitment, patient services, fundraising, research, and communications and marketing. Each function had been built as income grew, with its own leadership, targets, and its own operational infrastructure.

When Richard Davidson joined the communications team around 2010, it was, in his own words, "just a handful of people in a couple of teams." Six years later, the organisation had expanded significantly, with separate divisions pursuing the same supporters through different lenses. Donor recruitment wanted new registrations. Fundraising wanted income. Communications wanted reach. The supporter caught in the middle existed in each team's records as a different, partial version of themselves.

The structural change that would address this emerged from the departure of the Fundraising Director, Catherine Miles, who left after seven years. Instead of replacing Miles, CEO Henny Braund decided to merge the Communications, Marketing, and Fundraising divisions into a single Engagement Division. Davidson became Engagement Director, the only director accountable for the full supporter relationship. And two Associate Director roles were added, which preserved the fundraising expertise the merger might otherwise have lost.

Anthony Nolan's own accounts for the year of the merger tell the growth story that made the data fragmentation a predictable outcome. There were 47,000 regular givers in place by year's end. And donations and legacies grew from £9.5m to £11.3m in a single year, a 19% increase, with total income standing at £47.1m. Managing relationships at that scale, across functions that had grown independently, meant Anthony Nolan was incurring hidden operational costs that no amount of data entry would uncover. 

A year before the merger, Anthony Nolan's own digital manager went on record in CharityComms in 2015, identifying the primary driver of inconsistency on their social media channels as "internal pressure to promote department-specific needs." Different internal teams had requested two-thirds of the charity's social media output, each pursuing its own agenda through the same shared social media function. In other words, the digital team had to build a specific content strategy to navigate that pressure.

Organisational fragmentation was playing out as a social media problem, in which a shared operational function was unable to serve multiple masters at the same time. What Anthony Nolan was experiencing was growth creating the functions of donor recruitment, fundraising, events, and communications - and those functions creating fragmentation.

Because this was occurring within the social media team, the problem that emerged for Anthony Nolan's leadership was a communications alignment question. As different parts of the charity spoke to supporters differently, with different messages, the obvious solution was to create a unified engagement strategy.

But the communications problem wasn’t the whole picture. 

Operationally speaking, each function had been measured by its own outputs. For example, the number of donors recruited, the amount of income raised, or the number of events attended. Like many charities, no one was measured on what a supporter's record looked like once all the data was brought together. A supporter who donated, volunteered, ran a marathon, and joined the register existed in four separate team records rather than on one, which meant the communications problem hid something deeper, which showed up across three costs. 

The operational cost is straightforward: it is the maintenance of several versions of the same information, as well as work being done multiple times that should be done just once, for example, data entry or reconciling spreadsheets. 

Then there is the impact cost, whereby incomplete records mean incomplete relationships. A major donor who has also volunteered, run events, and appeared in register data but has never been approached about a legacy gift is a missed opportunity when those activities are not linked in the data. 

And there is the financial reporting cost that often sits at SLT. If the data feeding the management accounts is incomplete, the income figures cannot be fully explained, and the return on fundraising spend cannot be accurately assessed. And this means SLT may be making decisions on a partial picture. For the ops leader with SLT finance responsibility, or whose portfolio includes the fundraising function, there is no easy fix until the underlying data problem is solved.

If no one in your organisation is measured on the complete supporter record, whose job is it to notice when it breaks? 

The pattern is common in charities that diversify their income streams, where they build teams to manage each stream before they can build the infrastructure to manage them together, due to financial constraints. The result is an organisation that can tell you everything about what each function does, but almost nothing about what was achieved, in impact terms, across all of them.

The May 2016 merger left Davidson with one division, two inherited cultures, two sets of processes, and two data structures that did not connect. Anthony Nolan’s strategy work was commissioned to build the operational framework that the new structure needed. 

Described as “disciplined and rigorous” by Davidson, the main constraint was that timescales were short and the team was managing several other major initiatives at the same time.

Three intensive workshop sessions were run with the senior leadership team. The first session asked the leadership team to name the drivers -  the specific operational issues the new division needed to resolve and the questions the strategy would have to address. For the first time, function heads were required to collaborate and identify their challenges collectively. 

In the second workshop, the leadership team produced a one-page strategy map linking the four strands of key stakeholders, core competencies, people and culture, and resources and investment.

In the third workshop, the team drafted a scorecard showing how delivery against the strategy map would be measured and how impact would be identified. Specifically, the scorecard translated the strategy map's objectives into measurable commitments, such as what each team would deliver, by when, and how progress would be tracked across the division rather than within individual functions. 

The outputs from all the workshops were a one-page written plan with linked scorecards and initiatives, a longer engagement strategy providing operational context, and a people plan covering recruitment, skills development, and staff support. 

Davidson's own account, published in June 2016, was candid: "We know it's going to take time to change the working culture and create processes which reflect the new structure." The operational alignment, shared data standards, unified reporting, and deduplication processes were still to be built.

Most organisations run strategy work before implementing structural change. They run workshops, produce the strategy, and expect the structure to follow from the document. They schedule the away day before addressing who is accountable for implementing what comes out of it. 

That is a missed opportunity. 

What Anthony Nolan did was different. 

The workshops were productive because there was now one person, Davidson, who owned the mandate and accountability that the two previous directors had split between them. 

The workshops then forced the question that was avoidable in the previous structure, because when fundraising and communications operated under separate directors, no one was required to ask: what does the complete supporter relationship look like, and what does it cost us when we can’t see it? Each director could optimise for their own function's targets and still be considered to be doing a good job. The merger made that structurally impossible. 

Davidson's framing of working with the consultants as "disciplined and rigorous" signals that the intent was to create an operational foundation for improved impact, and that the scorecard was designed as a shared accountability tool.  

Whether it achieved the goal of being a shared accountability tool depends on whether the scorecard was connected to how the staff in the division were reviewed and how team budgets were set. The source does not confirm this. But the intent was there in the language of the commission.

The People Plan is the least evident output and possibly the most important. A merger of two cultures requires its people to work differently. The plan covering recruitment, skills development, and support was the operational bridge between the structural change on paper and the behavioural change in practice. Without it, the new structure would have held people accountable for outcomes they had not been equipped to deliver.

For the first time, the person responsible for supporter relationships could see all of them. Before May 2016, the complete picture of a supporter's history, their giving, their volunteering, and their register activity, existed across three or four team records and belonged to no one. After the merger, Davidson owned the whole, which meant what the organisation knew about any given supporter was now someone’s problem to solve. 

Davidson's own words from the time are honest about how much remained to be done: “We know it's going to take time to change the working culture and create processes which reflect the new structure.”

Anthony Nolan built its restructure around five tools, which, taken individually, are not novel, but when combined, they represent a specific phasing: structural change first, then the operational framework to make the structure work.

Division merger.

Merges previously separate engagement functions, in Anthony Nolan’s case, fundraising, communications, and marketing, under one director. In practice, this means one person can see the complete supporter record and is responsible for what it contains. Without it, no one in the organisation has the role of asking why the same supporter appears in three systems with three different histories because it falls outside all existing job descriptions.

One-page strategy map.

A shared operational reference point across all teams in the division to include the four strands of key stakeholders, core competencies, people and culture, resources and investment. These are mapped onto a single page, and this brevity is intentional, as a shorter document is harder for different teams to interpret.

Linked scorecard.

This complements the strategy map to ensure there’s an accountability framework. Its purpose is to provide a single view of whether the division's shared objectives are being delivered across all functions rather than within each function separately. The scorecard is where the strategy connects to how people are managed and measured, and should sit within an organisation’s performance management cycle. Otherwise, it functions as a record of good intentions.

Engagement strategy.

A more comprehensive document providing operational context for the one-page plan. Its purpose is to give function heads sufficient detail to translate shared objectives into their team's work without reverting to pre-merger ways of operating.

People Plan.

This covers staff recruitment, skills development, and support. Its purpose is to ensure that the newly created division has the people infrastructure needed to implement the strategy.

Strategies developed with scorecards only work if the scorecard is connected to how people are individually managed. If function leaders continue to be reviewed against their own team's targets, with the shared scorecard alongside their performance framework, then the data will remain fragmented regardless of the strategy. The thing to watch for: within a year of implementation or the consultant leaving, is the scorecard referenced in planning meetings, but not driving any decisions? Teams tend to optimise for their own metrics because those are the ones that appear in budget reviews, appraisals, and conversations with the CEO.

The second breaking point is more structural. Anthony Nolan's Engagement Division was created after a director left, and the CEO used the resulting vacancy as an opportunity to restructure. A structure created by a personnel event is vulnerable to the next one. If Davidson had left twelve months after the merger, would the merged division have survived, or would the next leadership decision have reverted to separate directors? Structures that depend on a single person's mandate are not yet institutionalised, and the test is whether accountability is embedded into governance documents, job descriptions, and performance frameworks, or whether it lives in a relationship and in someone's head.

The third point of failure is the one least likely to appear in any published account of this kind of work. The org chart might show one merged division. But does the CRM reflect the move to single record data as expected? Structural mergers change reporting lines, but they do not automatically consolidate the data infrastructure that each team has built independently. Systems change only if someone leads the work to change them. The early warning sign here is, two years on, are the same problems still sitting on the same desks?

Anthony Nolan implemented shared data governance to address what appeared to be a communications problem. But what of the operational alignment? The source case study does not tell us whether the data was consolidated, whether reporting became cleaner, or whether the operational fragmentation that preceded the merger persisted in the systems after it. The source cannot answer those questions. It was never written to do so. But they are the questions an ops leader reading this will want to ask of their own organisation before commissioning equivalent work. 

Davidson commissioned the strategy work and held the mandate. The division existed because he became its director. Every output - the strategy, the scorecard, and the People Plan - was built around that mandate being in place. 

It is a pattern that is not unique to Anthony Nolan. Think about the last restructure your organisation went through. There was probably one person who drove it, who held the relationships, knew the history, and understood why each decision had been made. The structure that emerged made sense because they were in it.

Anthony Nolan's restructure was designed to outlive Davidson. Or was it? 

Can your next project survive its leader leaving?

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