Disparate and desperate
Cats Protection, the UK’s leading cat welfare organisation, supports over 150,000 cats annually through its national network of volunteer-run branches and centres. However, with 11 disconnected data sources across departments like fundraising, retail, and rehoming, they lacked a unified view of their supporters. This siloed approach led to fragmented communications, missed Gift Aid claims, and strategic blind spots. The organisation needed a single, accurate picture of supporter interactions to improve decision-making, ensure GDPR compliance, and enable more effective engagement across all touchpoints.
The golden ticket
To solve this, a project called Golden Record was launched to build a Single Customer View (SCV) using BlenderSCV, tailored to the charity’s complex data ecosystem. The work involved integrating the 11 separate systems, connecting 4.5 million contacts, and creating a centralised, GDPR-compliant data hub. This required deep collaboration with the charity’s IT and data teams, auditing and cleaning records, and establishing a staging table for controlled data flow. The result was a dynamic, scalable infrastructure capable of powering strategic insights, enabling personalisation, and supporting transformation across digital systems and supporter communications.
Truly transformational
The Golden Record project has been truly transformative. It underpins a supporter-centric model that personalises engagement, improves operational efficiency and reveals new financial opportunities – such as reclaiming over £70,000 in missed Gift Aid.
Segmentation and insights have deepened, enabling smarter campaigns and better audience understanding. Legacy systems are being replaced, and data now fuels everything from marketing to advocacy. With a preference centre and CRM migration underway, Golden Record is helping Cats Protection futureproof its impact. Perhaps most significantly, the newfound understanding of how retail intersects with donations, volunteering and legacy giving is changing not only this charity – but potentially the sector.
