The National Trust is responsible for a large chunk of Britain’s heritage: with 500 major sites, covering 250,000 hectares of land, and spanning 700 miles of coastline. As the UK’s largest cultivation charity, the Trust — which was established by Sir Robert Hunter in 1895 — is one of the country’s largest landowners and plays […]
The National Trust is responsible for a large chunk of Britain’s heritage: with 500 major sites, covering 250,000 hectares of land, and spanning 700 miles of coastline.
As the UK’s largest cultivation charity, the Trust — which was established by Sir Robert Hunter in 1895 — is one of the country’s largest landowners and plays a key role in preserving many of its most beautiful and historical buildings.
It is also a place where old meets new, as the Trust seeks to implement new technologies to connect its 500 historic houses, castles, archaeological and industrial monuments, gardens, parks, and nature reserves.
In an exclusive interview with TechInformed National Trust CIO Jon Townsend explains: “It’s a huge operation, and we need to be able to provide the technology that’s ubiquitous so people can access it where they need to be in order to deliver on their roles and to deliver the public benefit.”
Sitting down with TI at the DTX conference in London, Townsend speaks passionately about new technologies, such as AI, and what they might offer his organisation.
“Everything from utilising technologies that give us a resilient network. We have about 25 million paying visitors every year, both members and non-members, we need to make sure those sites are properly connected,” he adds.
“We also need to provide those core services that every organisation needs: HR services, finance systems etc, and people need to be able to access those from anywhere, so making sure that they’re fully cloud hosted, fully secure services.”
The tech so far…
According to Townsend, the National Trust has integrated public cloud first and SaaS-based services in particular because they’re not built on infrastructure that needs to be made and maintained —”it means we don’t have to rely on bringing all of that access back to a single point,” the CIO explains.
Although integrating new technologies has been difficult for the charity since the pandemic, Townsend admitted, the National Trust has implemented a number of successful programmes, such as a resilient network across all sites and the migration of 100% of its data centres to fully cloud provisions.
“We’ve also implemented some great new technologies to interact with our members and doners, and the general public”, he adds, such as multi-cloud implementation Salesforce.
National Trust CIO Jon Townsend
Townsend claims that Salesforce data cloud allows the charity to engage with supporters and new supporters in ways it’s never been able to before. It utilises AI to offer personalised content to individuals allowing them to take control of how they interact, rather than giving everybody the same messaging. “We’ll be delivering this over the next 12 months,” he tells TI.
“In the last year we’ve also delivered a new public website, built on AWS.” But when facing any challenging technology implementation, businesses must firstly understand what it is they’re trying to deliver, how it’s aligned to the strategic aims of the organisation and then build a business team, technology team, and data team that work together to understand what it is they’re trying to achieve, he adds.
A peek into what’s to come
The charity is now looking to implement digital experiences on the website, or another platform, for people who haven’t or can’t visit the sites.
“There’s a lot we want to do around immersive technologies, visiting sites or perhaps places beyond our boundaries,” Townsend says.
The charity plans to use smart sensors to help its conservation mission, whether it be buildings, collections, or in the natural environment. The Trust will use the data to inform decisions on preservation efforts but also work with partners to deliver public benefit.
Technologies such as QR codes offering additional information about places and their history, will also be trialled at some of the National Trust’s sites.
“For many people it’s an opportunity to go have a decompression from the world, while other people want to go there to interact,” explains Townsend.
“Imagine a world where you might have an immersive experience, you don’t necessarily need to be at one of our sites to do that, so maybe for people who can’t visit — or when you’re at a site where something has happened historically that’s hard to picture, an augmented reality version might help people better understand that story.”
The charity has also established a working group that will look specifically at how generative AI can benefit the Trust and its customers in an ethical way,
“It’s also important to think about sustainability in everything you do. One of the key elements is having the irrefutable data to create an argument and make sure people understand the implications of what we’re doing,” he adds.
As the UK’s largest cultivation charity, measuring its output and emissions is a vital part of its goals, but tracking scope three emissions can be challenging, Townsend admits.
“From a supply chain perspective, part of our acquisition and procurement process is really understanding the sustainability credentials of suppliers and that we look into detail of their supply chains.
“They key is transparency. We try to work with suppliers that are transparent about their own scope 3 emissions.”
