The Foxes Trust Board are pleased to announce the co-option of Paul Rains to the Trust Board from the end of September.
Paul initially offered to help the Trust at our AGM and one was of a number of members that were given the opportunity to join Board Subgroups following completion of a skills analysis where it was clear he would significantly boost our experience with the identified need to overhaul our membership systems, Paul therefore joined the Membership and Surveys Subgroups.
Paul is currently undergoing the full set of Football Supporters Association (FSA) training sessions on running Football Supporters Trusts and will join the board upon completion at the end of this month.
We asked Paul to introduce himself to our members….
Background
I am a life-long City fan, my Grandfather took me to me first game at Filbert Street way back in 1963 to see the’ Ice Kings’ and I have been hooked ever since. As a youth and young adult, I was a consistent home and away supporter. After getting married to my wife Jill we moved away from Leicester for a while, so I became an avid radio listener. I reconnected with the live match day experience when I took my son to his first game back in 1993 and have been a season ticket holder ever since.
My initial career background was Payroll and whilst I could tell you if you are paying too much tax! My passion was always the systems that were used to make these quite often complex calculations. One of the highlights of my career was being voted onto the Board of the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) by fellow professionals and later becoming the vice and chair of the board. The CIPP is a not-for-profit membership organisation with over 9,500+ members and 15,000+ professionals having CIPP approved qualifications, so I hope I can bring some of the valuable experience I learnt there to the Foxes Trust.
After being made redundant at 50, together with a fellow work colleague, we set up our own business support consultancy, which we ran for 13 years until I retired. I worked primarily in HR / Payroll / Finance / IT, developing and maintaining business support systems, this work was varied and could include, business analysis, the procurement and implementation of people-based systems, business process improvement, migrating data from the legacy platform to the new one and system testing. I have successfully project managed several new system implementations to plan and budget both in the private sector and the public sector working with some of the biggest companies in the UK.
What I have been doing
Since offering to help the Trust at the AGM back in March of this year. I have been looking at the Trusts overall strategy for Membership and looking at ways to grow and incentivise the membership and service our members more effectively and efficiently. My former experiences have helped me greatly with this. I have been looking at membership benefit packages and I have evaluated the existing CRM system that the Foxes Trust use, the current web site, and our Survey software as they all need to talk and integrate with each other and my hope and ambition is to help deliver something new innovative and exciting for our members and prospective members.
Areas highlighted for improvement include looking at systems that might automate processes to enable us to provide a slicker smother service when it comes to new members joining or existing members renewing their membership. Automated messaging, systems that could reward members for their loyalty or referring a colleague for membership, and finally systems that allow fellow members to engage with each other on likeminded topics regarding our beloved football team.
A system requirements specification has been created which highlights the essential and desirable features of any new system, and we will be drawing up a short list of potential suppliers for the Board to evaluate soon. I am conscious having looked at the membership demographics that we have a diverse membership group including international and honorary members of varying age groups, so we need to cater for them all, from our younger members who do almost everything on a smart phone to our members who sometimes find it difficult to embrace new technology or get access to it.
So, any solution we chose must be scalable and have growth potential, be digital ready, meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act and be value for money because we have an obligation to our members to spend their money wisely and meet the requirements for all our members.