case study 7 - community partnership

The Challenge
‘We want to make our charity organisation a source of support and assistance to the African Community in the United Kingdom; we are committed to supporting this expatiate community and encouraging them to develop their skills and to support our work in Africa. Our current projects focus on health and education.

We want to bridge the gap between our different communities effectively and cheaply (in terms of cost and time). We want to concentrate our resources on face to face contact with our users.

We also want to involve as many people as possible in our communications programmes.

We recognised that the most effective would be to use the Internet, but how and at what cost presented us with a few problems

Project Details
We decided that a website where we can promote our activities and describe what we do would be a great help.

New Cross Gate New Deal for Communities headed by Clive Wilson had initiated a project to provide a community based internet solution for a number of groups in New Cross Gate and Lewisham.

We decided we would participate in this when Objective Internet demonstrated the system to us. We were impressed with the system; basically we want a easy to manage series of news and about us pages, along with lists of events and the ability to maintain a list of our users and then contact them either by e-mail or post.

The system meets all of these needs and once our mind was made up we started a training programme, all of our staff have been given training in the system and can update the details of training courses and other events.

We organise projects in Africa; the objective of these is to develop a support infrastructure for projects that can be driven by teams in the United Kingdom that can provide support through fundraising and a community spirit of generosity. Developing our own skills is key and learning by doing is by far the best way. Once again this is where our project can help us.

We plan to build different websites using the same technology for other of our projects both here in the UK and in Africa.

This technology gives us the flexibility and thanks to the support of the New Cross Gate NDC and Objective Internet we now have the tools for the job.

We now have to make sure we benefit from the advantages the system gives us and this includes the way we communicate with our members and users. Surprisingly access to computers and the internet is good in New Cross Gate and this again is thanks to Lewisham and the NDC. We will be able to reduce our costs if we can e-mail most of the people we have contact with.

For example we hold some training and exercise sessions over a 12 week period; very occasionally these sessions are moved to a different venue or have to be postponed and we can now contact most of the participants using the e-mail system in a few moments rather than 20 or so phone calls.

Conclusion
We are expecting to move forward in 2008 using the system more and more, we expect it to help us do more events partly because they will be easier to promote and organise.

We are building our contact list of Members and Customers and adding e-mail addresses to existing contact details where possible and are listing our events on our website. We have also added all of our contact details for team leaders.

By using this system we can reduce some of our print costs and provide more readily available information and update it with news and information