Manchester Pride Chooses Melbourne as Tech Partner

Melbourne will help the charity overhaul its digital presence by providing more reliable hosting for a new CRM system which will enable it to communicate better with the thousands of supporters who help it campaign on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues.

As well as running an award-winning festival, Manchester Pride supports a range of charities and organisations in delivering projects with direct impact on the LGBT community and those living with, or affected by HIV, across the North West of England. Since 2003 it has raised and distributed over £1.1million.

Mark Fletcher, Chief Executive of Manchester Pride, said: “We’ve grown as a charity over the past few years and are now at the stage where we need to streamline our systems as an organisation. Part of this means looking closely at how we manage our IT. We currently have a number of different and cumbersome systems in place for back up and data management. We will be working with the experts at Melbourne to improve that and bring it all together.”

The focal point of the charity is the annual festival which takes place every year in August with a host of high profile artists performing in the main arena alongside talented performers from the local community, a bustling market and the George House Trust Candlelit Vigil. This summer’s Big Weekend attracted tens of thousands of visitors from across the country and beyond to watch such as Anastacia, All Saints, Foxes and MNEK.

Aside from the Big Weekend, the charity presents Pride Fringe which encompasses a series of art, culture, heritage, debate, sport, music and film events celebrating the great diversity of the LGBT community. 2013 also saw the introduction of Supersonic, a red carpet event held underneath the wings of Concorde at Manchester Airport.

Matt Gardiner, Sales & Services Director for Melbourne, said: “We’re delighted that Manchester Pride has selected Melbourne as its hosting provider. For charities organising big events which have growing databases and huge traffic spikes around the time of those events, it’s vital that the IT infrastructure can support this. The solution we have provided meets the charity’s increasing demands and can be scaled up to support future growth.”

Melbourne is part of cloud company iomart. For more information about the range of hosting services offered by Melbourne visit www.melbourne.co.uk or Tweet @melbournehost

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