Poetry by Heart's nationwide poetry recital contest - backed by the Department for Education - gets hundreds of schools and thousands of students taking part in regional heat with the hope of winning a place in the national finals.

For the central management team, keeping tabs on school and competitor information was a growing headache. To bring relief, we created an automated content management system, shared by Poetry by Heart and its sister organisation The Poetry Archive.

With the new system in place, everything's joined up and seamless, from front end to back office - and all the information Poetry by Heart needs to manage key relationships with schools is at their fingertips.

Before
Up to six administrators relied on using two large spreadsheets to manually record large amounts of important information regarding the day-to-day operation of the website. It was time consuming and information was only available in one place and open to human error.

'When I demonstrated the website, the team actually gasped. Instead of wrestling with a spread sheet, we were able to spend our time far more productively talking to teachers and getting them connected at the local level. It's not often that poets talk about software but surely the great John Keats had our database in mind when he wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever'.'
Julie Blake, Co-director, Poetry by Heart