Noise Solution

Noise Solution connects at-risk young people with professional musicians to learn new skills, boost their self-worth, and help them feel more in control.

With help from an implementation partner, the organization rolled out Salesforce using mostly declarative functionality and clicks not code. The idea being to leverage technology to help change peoples’ lives for good, while saving the state millions in reduced resource drain for families and local government. Salesforce provides both a CRM and an internal social media platform with a user-centric portal where multiple stakeholders form a support network for each young person.

Participants, musicians, families, and local authorities can access everything they need via an Experience Cloud portal. And with Service Cloud, Heroku, Experience Cloud, and Tableau components combined to capture next-level insights, the organization has the beginnings of an intelligent solution to shape the program around participant well-being and get the best possible outcome. Automation is also reducing manual workloads, meaning the lean team of five can support hundreds of young people every year.

Noise Solution is changing lives and saving local governments millions – and it has the stories and metrics to prove it.

A few years ago, Simon Glenister wasn’t just Noise Solution’s Founder and CEO. He was its web developer, accountant, and policy manager, and handled all relationships – not to mention being a professional drummer. He had a lot of responsibilities and manual work to do to keep programs running.

The organisation relied on spreadsheets and private channels on a microblogging and social networking website to capture what happened in sessions and share highlights with family and key workers. To track wellbeing changes, the team manually analysed national guidelines to monitor wellbeing.

While the organisation had a CRM platform, when Damien Ribbans joined as Operations Director, he and Glenister shared a vision of building an internal social media network on one platform with the capability to collect and analyse these stories alongside data and automated processes – while having 360-degree visibility of operations at Noise Solution.

“We needed a solution that was acceptable to young people and met the needs of local authorities by enabling us to follow safeguarding protocols,” explained Glenister.

The platform needed to empower young people to feel in control whilst taking part in the programme. It also needed to support musicians with practical functionality like session scheduling and communication tools, and give families and commissioners – the organisation sponsoring the young person – the right level of insight without making participants feel pressured or scrutinised.

Noise Solution implemented Sales Cloud as its CRM in 2017, but when it rolled out Experience Cloud and Chatter, the magic really started.“We’ve put a huge amount of research into our programme and understand there’s a real person behind every data point. To get the full picture, we needed to combine data with stories,” said Ribbans.

“We customised Salesforce and created media-rich private Chatter groups where participants capture what they’ve created and their thoughts on their evolving mentoring journey, while sharing safely with family and key workers,” said Ribbans.

The organisation has started to develop, using a solution built by VRP Consulting on Salesforce, the ability to unlock qualitative data from video recordings such as participants’ wellbeing and sentiment in real time.

“Sentiment and linguistic analysis is next level impact management. It helps us understand and react in real time to what’s happening, to continue to drive up impact,” explained Ribbans.

The idea being that Einstein Next Best Action will generate tasks to help connect everyone involved in the process. For example, notifying teachers and family members with recommendations to provide further support.

Experience Cloud tailors a custom experience for different user groups on the platform. Participants can explore personalised content to learn more about Noise Solution. By using page variations, they can display information to users in a way that is familiar and comfortable to them.

While mentors – working musicians – apply to work at Noise Solution via a web-to-case integration on the website. Leads, captured in Service Cloud, are routed to a portal where musicians can upload documentation and do mandatory training. Through the portal, they can share Zoom links for sessions and write reports that are shared directly in Salesforce. Commissioners and families can log in to follow the journey and ensure safeguarding processes are followed.

Noise Solution’s internal processes are equally well thought out. After taking a week-long course and using Trailhead, Ribbans learned how to map and automate journeys. Today, up to 95% of processes have been automated with Flow Builder – which means the small team can manage programmes for hundreds of young people every year.

“Sometimes a human intervention is necessary; we aren’t trying to automate everything. Salesforce helps us to be more efficient by generating alerts when we need to do something,” Ribbans explained. “We’ve doubled what we can do with the same team with a single log-in.”

While Noise Solution has always been doing incredible things, the team can do them at scale with Salesforce. “Crucially, we can deliver custom experiences for young people from a professional platform that cements our credibility with local authorities by ensuring security and safeguarding protocols are in place,” commented Ribbans.

Salesforce enables Noise Solution to automate and streamline its processes – creating a better experience for its users – while providing a 360 degree view of its impact on young people. It frees up capacity for the small team, allowing them to engage with more young people to help them feel empowered, in control, and create music they can feel proud of.

The data that Noise Solution’s approach captures and analyzes is staggering. Participants reported a 50% drop in low wellbeing, with young women seeing twice as much impact on their well-being – proven as a statistical probability.

An independent report on the financial impact of improved well-being found that for every £1 invested in Noise Solution, families and local services saved £3.34 by diverting a young person from a path that could result in admission to a mental health facility, for example.

But what matters most at Noise Solution is the people behind the numbers – Sophie, who went from struggling to leave the house to playing a live gig, or Jake, who found a new way to express himself and became a role model for his peers. With Salesforce, Noise Solution continues to connect with those who feel lost and gives them a renewed sense of self, confidence, and help to find their place in the world.

Noise Solution connects with at-risk young people to improve their lives and encourage positive change. Over a 10-week programme, the organisation matches individuals with professional musicians to make music together while promoting wellbeing by helping young people to feel more independent, competent, and share something they’re great at with the people closest to them.