Life Cycle, a Bristol-based charity that promotes cycling for personal and environmental transformation, is undergoing a digital transformation to enhance its IT systems and support its growth and diverse projects aimed at benefiting disadvantaged individuals.

About Life Cycle

Life Cycle, headquartered in Bristol, is a charity that transforms lives and the environment through cycling. It helps thousands of people each year by providing bikes and cycle training for all ages and abilities, organising cycling activities for people with additional needs and delivering industry-accredited training for the public – and people in prison. Its diverse projects help people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to benefit from cycling, supporting thousands of disadvantaged and marginalised people to boost their well-being, skills and social connections.

The Challenge

Life Cycle has experienced significant growth over the last few years and reached a key milestone of £1m turnover, which brings higher expectations on the organisation, particularly on its internal IT systems. It initiated a digital transformation programme, to include a new website, bespoke systems but particularly updating its day-to-day IT office ecosystem.

“We had been using a platform with local storage and no remote working capability, which didn’t meet our multi-location and hybrid working requirements and wasn’t going to be able to grow with our organisation.” -Becky Whitlock, Marketing Manager at Life Cycle.

Life Cycle has a complex business model, with many different projects and services operated from 3 sites by full and part time staff working at office locations and remotely, including from a prison where inmates are provided with training to assist their rehabilitation. A solution was required which would enable all areas of the organisation to share information and documents and collaborate effectively.

In line with its mission statement, Life Cycle is planning for more growth to enable it to reach more people, which requires systems that are sustainable and will grow with the organisation.

Following a rigorous assessment process, Codestone was selected to implement Microsoft 365 and to provide on-going support for all aspects of the solution. “Our conversations with Codestone gave us the confidence they were able to help us transition from our legacy systems to the Microsoft 365 environment and work collaboratively with us to solve the problems that were holding us back,” says Becky. “An early example was a tricky upgrade of the anti-virus software on all our devices, where Codestone ensured a successful outcome and properly documented everything so subsequent updates would be easier.”

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