The Royal Horticultural Society cultivates a greater love of gardening through Dynamics 365 and Azure

Millions of people stroll through the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) five gardens, visit 230 partner gardens, and admire floral displays during world-renowned flower shows, such as the RHS Chelsea Flower show. Knowledgeable RHS experts help schools grow healthy food and gardens, inspiring children to get their hands dirty to improve the environment and their health. RHS scientists research the human wellness benefits of plants and study how to increase biodiversity and enlist green spaces in the fight against climate change. And the UK’s leading gardening nonprofit shares practical tips through advisory services, libraries, community events, online articles, and their Grow app, while training and qualifications enable passionate horticulturalists to hone their craft, from leisure learning to PhDs. 

"RHS supports people in their lifelong adventure in gardening,” says Jon Simpson, Director of IT at the RHS. Appreciating and growing plants increases joy, improves health, and contributes to environmental sustainability.  

“To become even more relevant for members, we needed to invest in technology,” Simpson says. With help from Microsoft service provider Avanade, the RHS adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365. With partner Transparity, RHS migrated its applications, data, and systems to the Azure cloud as part of its digital transformation journey.  

With modern platforms and infrastructure, the nonprofit is improving the member experience, turning data into actionable insights, and advancing its sustainability goals. Simpson says, “Technology will grow our membership and increase fundraising revenue, all in service of our charitable purpose: to get more people gardening.” 

Cultivating deeper member relationships

With more than 600,000 members and 26 million unique website visitors annually, people interact with the RHS in a wide range of ways—yet those details used to be siloed by program and department. “Dynamics 365 helps us better serve our members by giving us a single view of our audiences,” Simpson says. 

The RHS staff field calls and emails from people looking for gardening advice, giving feedback on a class or flower show they attended, suggesting improvements, and more. Now staff can record notes in each member’s Dynamics 365 contact record, building a comprehensive understanding of their relationship with the nonprofit. The RHS is also integrating ticketing information to record who has recently attended an event or show. This record empowers service staff to follow up on a previous concern or ask about a recent garden visit, cultivating deeper relationships that lead to brand loyalty. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will also enable the RHS to tailor communications and email journeys based on members’ interests. For example, if a member attended a workshop for homeschooling families, they might like recommendations of books on gardening with children from the retail shop. "Dynamics 365 will enable us to have personal interactions with members, at scale,” Simpson says. “That helps make sure they get a fantastic experience with us.”   

Improving the experience for plant enthusiasts

The RHS works to demystify gardening and inspire everyone to enjoy plants, so it continually works to improve. The organization leveraged Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, a feedback management app, to centralize and aggregate supporter questions and evaluations. 

Staff used to forward comments over email and simply answer questions as they came in, with no consistent way of tracking resolutions or analyzing trends. Now every RHS staff member can access Customer Voice, ensuring each member and visitor’s feedback is recorded and properly valued. The RHS plans to equip staff in gardens and flower shows with tablets running a digital feedback form that connects to Customer Voice via Power Apps. On-site comment opportunities enable visitors to share ideas in the moment.

The collective data will lead to insights into how to improve. That way, the RHS can act to fix issues (such as long waits at garden entrances), celebrate wins (by recognizing star staff), and replicate successes (repeating a workshop that got rave reviews). Staff can also write articles that address common questions, building a knowledge base that empowers the team to more quickly assist RHS audiences.

“We look after our staff, volunteers, and members,” Simpson says. “Technology is further helping them feel like they belong with RHS.”

Leveraging data to plan and predict

The RHS reaches diverse audiences through a wide variety of programming, from the illuminated garden holiday event Glow to educational outreach in schools across the country. The finance team used to manually collect, process, and analyze numbers in Excel to understand the previous week’s performance. With Azure Synapse funneling data from multiple sources into Power BI, the process has gone from requiring days to hours, and it provides daily rather than weekly briefings. The RHS is refining this operation to aim for near-real-time dashboards.

With a click of a button, the leadership team and operational leads can run a report on visitor traffic in RHS gardens, the number of gardening advice calls, store sales figures, and more. Leadership relies on these recaps to react and plan. “We’re deeply excited about the amount of information we’re getting to build business cases and make decisions,” says Ruth Le Ber, Membership Services Customer Care and Quality Control Manager at the RHS. For example, insights may prompt the marketing team to increase outreach to help hit revenue goals or adjust staffing for popular events. 

With the time saved using Power BI, the finance team “has moved on to doing more advanced insights,” Simpson says. They are training colleagues to use Power BI, leading to a self-service culture that empowers others to independently make more informed decisions. They are also building more models and dashboards in Power BI, increasing the RHS’s power to leverage data for a greener UK. 

The RHS is building out predictive analytics capabilities in Power BI, fueled by the comprehensive data in Azure and Dynamics 365, plus external information such as weather. “We anticipate seeing much more accurate prediction models, which benefits us not just around operational planning day by day but also forecasting for the future,” Simpson says.

Predictive analytics will also help identify members at risk of letting their support lapse. “Analytics and Dynamics 365 can help us determine the next best course of action to save that particular member” through reminders of membership benefits, sharing details of RHS's charitable work, personalized product recommendations, or a friendly phone call, Simpson explains. Consistent membership revenue helps the RHS enrich more lives through plants.

Powering the fight against climate change

The RHS’s robust data platform based on Azure Data Lake, Azure SQL DB, and more sets the stage for advanced data capabilities today and in the future. “We now have a foundation in Azure that allows us to evolve and adapt,” Simpson says. 

The nonprofit is housing a database of more than 300,000 plant cultivars within Azure as the basis for its Plants for Purpose initiative. The collaboration collects high-resolution images, growing guidance, and details about each plant’s potential for counteracting aspects of climate change, increasing biodiversity, and supporting human health. The database will eventually connect to the RHS Grow app, putting practical sustainability knowledge into the hands of hundreds of thousands of users. 

Plants for Purpose will also inform governmental bodies, the environmental horticulture industry, developers, schools, health care facilities, and organizations responsible for large-scale planting. The in-depth resource will guide them toward plant choices that sequester carbon dioxide, provide shade, prevent erosion and flooding, cool cities, attract pollinators and wildlife, and more.  

The high-performance Azure platform is scalable, adjusting to the RHS's changing capacity needs. Its reliability and flexibility support data-intensive projects that advance the organization’s goals, including sustainability. “Our tools, messaging, and platforms allow us to reach individual gardeners and to influence governments and housing associations,” Simpson says. “As we scale up our efforts, that can really make a difference. Everyone can help in the fight against climate change.”

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