Veolia Environmental Trust - Optimy

The Veolia Environmental Trust was created in 1997. Since then, the organization has been supporting a variety of community and environmental projects in different locations in England. Since its creation, Veolia has supported the Trust with over £85 million which has been used to award more than 2,400 projects. Thanks to Veolia Trust, communities across the country improved their buildings, parks, and other open spaces. In 2016, the Veolia Trust found itself in that position. With 12 staff members to take care of 25 projects per quarter, the foundation had to find a solution that would allow them to do the same work with only five people.

Veolia was looking for someone to help them automate their processes. Due to a wide range of projects they were looking for ways to decrease the amount of time spent. They were looking for someone to help them to focus on what matters!

Moving to Optimy meant automating processes that were done manually was possible. According to Elizabeth Cooke, being able to build forms with conditional questions has been a time-saver: “our projects are really wide-ranging. Now, we can build forms in ways that adapt to the needs of our applicants. We can ask for all the information up front, so it saves both our time and theirs. We want to make it as simple as possible, and with Optimy, we can do that.”

She also points out that being able to contact a large number of applicants from one click as well as each grant officer being able to manage their work within the project file has improved the outcomes and processes of the team. Now, they can focus on what matters, helping communities across England. 

The core philosophy of Optimy is to empower mission-driven teams to give more to society. When it comes to that, Elizabeth Cooke believes we have been doing a good job: “if you are looking to make changes and improve your systems and processes to meet the needs of your applicants it’s definitely worth using Optimy to do that.”