This page lists several projects that utilise ICT and partnership working between the voluntary and public sectors. The case studies are:

• ICT Hub
• Community First: Herefordshire and Worcestershire Local Infrastructure Consortia Portals
• 5 Counties Online
• BME Complementary Learning Network
• Ethical Property
• Common Database – York & North Yorkshire

Case Study: ICT Hub

The ICT Hub is a partnership of national Voluntary and Community Organisations (VCOs) providing a range of services to assist organisations in the voluntary and community sector to access the benefits of ICT. The Hub came out of the ChangeUp initiative from the Home Office designed to strengthen the capacity of the voluntary and community sector.

The core members of the ICT Hub are:

• iT4Communities
• National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
• National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA)
• AbilityNet
• London Advice Services Alliance (LASA)

For further information see www.icthub.org.uk

The ICT Hub is one of the largest collaborations in the sector trying to effect change in the way the VCS uses and benefits from technology. The partners collaborate to provide a range of services to help voluntary and community organisations benefit from ICT. They also collaborate using ICT to provide these services and to enable others to collaborate and share learning. The partners bring together their different skills and expertise to collaborate on some projects as a whole partnership and some just with one or two other partners.

The ICT Hub collaborates to provide a range of services in the following areas:

• To raise awareness of the strategic understanding of the importance of ICT
• To improve the funding and procurement environment with which voluntary and community organisations operate
• To support and co-ordinate the provision of hands-on ICT Support

Joint Purchasing: The ICT Hub collates information on who brokers discounts; available at www.icthub.org.uk

Participating in online help groups and joining an existing network: There are a number of online help groups for infrastructure, circuit riders, IT Volunteers and frontline groups to benefit from funding to procurement of ICT. Please see ICT Hub discussion forums

Signposting and adapting existing resources: Within the ICT Hub's website www.icthub.org.uk are two other websites: a knowledge base of good practice materials and a directory of local support including trainers and circuit riders searchable by postcode. The ICT Hub website publishes its own research and publications about the take up and use of ICT in the sector as well as signposting to others resources.

Passing on expertise for free or at low cost: The ICT Hub is developing two models of ICT support – pro bono volunteers and circuit riders. IT volunteers are an effective way of supporting organisations and the Hub can offer a wide range of volunteers all over the country as well as virtually! IT Volunteering

The ICT Hub is also working to increase the number of circuit riders. For further information about circuit riding see ICT Hub - Circuit Riders.  

A buddying scheme for mutual help or advice scheme: The ICT Hub offers two buddying schemes. The ICT Connect scheme enables voluntary and community organisations to explore their ICT needs by visiting another organisation. Please see ICT Connect. The exchange visit scheme is similar to the ICT Connect scheme but for infrastructure agencies. Please see ICT Hub - Exchange Visits.

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Case study: Community First - Herefordshire and Worcestershire Local Infrastructure Consortia Portals

The Herefordshire and Worcestershire Infrastructure Consortia are working to make sure that voluntary organisations and community groups can access the support and services they need to achieve their aims. They also work to increase the influence that the sector has in how public services are run.

Their Website / Extranet Project created a web portal jointly to deliver the information and services of the consortia members to their users. The project developed new websites for the core consortia members, ensured compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act and enabled staff to manage their information easily on the website using content management systems. 

The project has developed an extranet (private secure website) to support the internal work by consortia members.

Community First’s Local Infrastructure Consortium Portals have 15 new websites and extracts built for partners and jointly searched by the portals.

More information:

• Herefordshire Infrastructure Consortium
• Worcestershire Infrastructure Consortium

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Case study: Five Counties ICT Project

Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation (GMCVO) appointed a 5 Counties Officer in August 2004 with the objective of developing the previously successful Three Counties project. The initial three counties were Cumbria, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. Joining them in the expanded project were Merseyside and Cheshire. The Lloyds TSB Foundation funded the Project for 2 years.

The five main threads of the project were:

• An accredited ICT management training module;
• Dissemination of work done on data protection audit and procedures;
• Dissemination of work done on creating corporate IT filing systems;
• Co-ordination of e-communities' networks; and
• Development of mechanisms for sharing electronic data.

The 5 Counties Project was successfully concluded in summer 2006. One of the most significant outcomes was the establishment of relationships and contacts across the entire region. The mix of larger urban consortia and rural consortia was invaluable. The urban consortia were able to offer support and resources to the rural counties, and the rural partners able to assist in the ‘rural proofing’ and prepare for DeFRA investment. The joint working arrangements have also meant that the interests of the sub regions have been represented at the regional level. Best practice was shared throughout each of the regions as a further advantage.

Greater Manchester (GM) deployed £355,000 ChangeUp funding to implement part of the GM ICT strategy and were in a position to assist the other four counties with ChangeUp investment. GM undertook an analysis of the ChangeUp ICT investment plans to look for opportunities for collaboration, and funding was secured for the 5 Counties Officer to co-ordinate and support the involvement of the ChangeUp lead bodies and the deployment of the funds.

Delivery was completed on:

• The delivery of an accredited ICT management training module: In partnership with 3TC in Merseyside and Community Futures in Lancashire they finalised and ILM-accredited the course, and secured funding from the national ChangeUp ICT Hub to train the trainers.  The course was developed to meet a need within the sector identified through research by the Barings Foundation and Liverpool John Moores University and will enable non-expert chief officers of organisations to plan, manage and budget for their ICT requirements.
• Dissemination of work done on data protection audit and procedures: They produced and piloted a toolkit for voluntary organisations to use to create their own data protection procedures and policies
• Dissemination of work done on creating corporate IT filing systems: They produced a toolkit for organising electronic information into a corporate structure.
• Co-ordination of e-communities' networks: e-communities' networks were developed in all five sub-regions, and ICT development strategies agreed in three. These networks enable all voluntary sector ICT service providers to collaborate and represent the needs of the sector to Digital Development Agencies (agencies that bring together people and businesses to benefit from the opportunities created by the digital revolution).
• Development of mechanisms for sharing electronic data: Initial work carried out under this strand was picked up and developed under ChangeUp. 

All resources developed through the ‘Five Counties Project’ are jointly owned by the partners. They are therefore able to use them freely to assist voluntary organisations in their areas.

More information: GMCVO 5 Counties Network 

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Case study: BME Complementary Learning Network

Four organisations providing a network of out-of-hours education support have successfully collaborated in a project involving equipment purchase, co-ordinated delivery of courses and shared monitoring.

The African Caribbean Citizens Forum (ACCF), Muslim Khatri Association (MKA) and Pakistan Youth and Community Association (PYCA), led by the Bangladesh Youth and Cultural Shomiti (BYCS), set up the BME Complementary Education Network in 2004 to deliver courses from a range of community centres across Leicester.

A joint bid to the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund led by BYCS enabled computers and other equipment to be purchased at a discount on behalf of the network. As a UK Online Centre, BYCS had previous experience of purchasing so could advise partners on suitable equipment. MKA were able to identify further funding sources and distributed information by email to the other partners. The Somali Afro European Media Project, an affiliate member of the ACCF, were able to offer skills in streaming video and audio of presentations, meetings and interviews for channels tailored to the community.

The partners also shared existing support contacts and suppliers. The smaller, younger partner organisations benefited from the track record of BYCS while contributing other expertise like policies and procedures. Rather than duplicating equipment at all the centres, some specialist equipment was placed in appropriate centres. For example, the MKA had a large, accessible training room with a lift – certain courses and equipment were located there.

During the project, monitoring had been individually administered until they realised that one of the partners had existing forms that could be adapted, and experience of data protection issues. The forms were redesigned by one of the partners and now a common system is used with consistent information being passed to the local authority instead of four different sets of forms.

Advantages

• Courses are co-ordinated across all partners to ensure better attendance and use of resources
• Technical experience of wireless networking, purchasing and support contacts is shared between the partners
• Spin-off projects, such as single shared database that can be updated by any of the partners, are being tested

Disadvantages

• A shared events diary has not worked as well as anticipated, with no single partner taking ownership
• Information dissemination. The sessions and courses being offered are now co-ordinated much more efficiently within the partnership. However it is difficult for potential users to find out what classes are on when across the network. The information is spread across four different websites, in several different languages. The need has been identified for a central website that can be updated by all of the partners so that information can be passed on to all potential users of the partnership's services in the future

More information: 

• Pakistan Youth and Community Association
• Bangladesh Youth and Cultural Shomiti
• Somali Afro European Media Project (a project of the ACCF)

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Case study: Ethical Property IT Development

The Ethical Property IT department offers a wide range of services to their tenants. Since their establishment in 1998, Ethical Property has set up 12 multi-occupancy centres across the country for social change and regeneration organisations, offering tenants reasonable rents; shared facilites and the benefits of sharing space with other like-minded organisations. Having contact with over 150 tenant organisations in this time, they realised that many organisations within the Voluntary and Community Sector do not prioritise their IT needs. As such, they decided to expand the range of IT services they provided to their tenants and the voluntary sector as a whole.

In addition to offering access to a communal high speed broadband line, and sophisticated phone system, tenants in some centres have been offered access to a communal server. The benefits of this to tenants are extensive, including:

• Higher specification servers at a lower purchase and maintenance cost than could be afforded if each tenant bought individually
• A comprehensive email system, including centralised anti-virus and anti-spam control; shared calendars and contacts; email access via the web, and back up for their email data.
• Fully backed up and protected file-storage for their data
• More reliable and affordable IT support. The high degree of technical knowledge Ethical Property have gained, ensures that tenants can take full advantage of the benefits a server can bring, and feel secure in the knowledge it is properly managed and maintained
• Improved communal IT services such as an electronic room booking facility, intranet, shared calendars etc; and
• Provision of further services such as remote access to files etc

Tenants in both centres where this has been offered have opted to join the shared system. Over the coming year, Ethical Property will be looking to see how they can offer these communal services to other tenants, and to organisations not based within their centres.

The Ethical Property team have found that any VCS organisation thinking of entering into a shared back office arrangement needs to do careful research into how many users they will have and the costs they will need to charge to ensure the project breaks even. They will also need to ensure that the hardware is of a high enough specification to cope with future expansion, and the addition of new services. Once a communal server is in place it can act as a platform for further IT development, such as the implementation of an intranet; remote access to files; providing web services etc. Ethical Property found they had to provide additional memory/back-up hardware to ensure the servers could cope with the increased services they decided to add.

If you would like more information on the experiences of Ethical Property, or on the IT services they can offer (especially to multi-occupancy buildings, or groups wishing to collaborate on IT projects), please contact ...

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Case study: Common database for infrastructure organisations in York & North Yorkshire

The infrastructure consortium within York and North Yorkshire identified a need for a central system for storing data within the sub region in order to increase efficiency and reduce duplication.

The consortium’s initial plan for a simple database that shared information across the organisations was dismissed when those involved saw the opportunity to develop an application that would provide much more. It would enable the sector to address the need for customer relationship management, keep data alive and to share research and surveys on and by the sector. It would also provide the tools for the infrastructure to communicate with the frontline Voluntary and Community organisations more effectively and more efficiently.

The concept of a voluntary sector data management application was developed, which provided all of these functions and more. The technical development was managed by the ICT advice project running within the sub region, and the steering group worked in conjunction with the chosen suppliers, ESiT. 

ESiT’s existing thankQ application was adapted to the needs of the voluntary sector in York and North Yorkshire, and work commenced on negotiating data transfer from the existing data sources across the infrastructure. The thankQ application was chosen as it met the needs of those involved and had the flexibility to allow modification and adjustment to meet each organisation’s needs. It allowed integration of customer relationship management, events and resource planning, and flexible reporting - surpassing the requirements initially specificied.

Due to the expertise of ESiT and the availability of ICT advice and support from the existing project within the sector, the technical problems were limited. The most challenging aspects were 1. The need to distribute the application across the 17 organisations without disrupting their existing systems, and 2. The implementation and management of the extra hardware and infrastructure to host the application. The application is hosted on a terminal server and access is via remote desktop. The exchange server was deployed in a send only configuration so as to enable the sending of emails from within the system, but not interfere with the existing email systems.  The hardware was deployed in an existing Rack unit, with a separate static IP to allow remote access.

The most significant issue in developing the application was the concept of data ownership. Each infrastructure organisation assumes that it owns the data that it holds on individuals and organisations, and that sharing that data will somehow weaken their ability to deliver services and attract funding. Misinterpretation of the data protection act and misunderstanding of the database’s purpose meant that a lot of time and effort was needed to get the infrastructure organisations to collaborate. It was of paramount importance that the infrastructure organisations met regularly to discuss issues relating to the database and its use. After some initial concerns about sharing their data, the organisations were convinced that the system was going to be a significant benefit to them, and that it would enable them to improve their service delivery and reduce their data management costs. The operation group meetings continue, and are by far the best format for resolving issues. An agreement will be drawn up between the infrastructure organisations to set out guidelines as to acceptable use of the data and naming conventions for customisable elements within the system.

The main benefits of the system are both related to the system itself and to the collaborative aspects of sharing data. The system will provide a centrally managed and maintained data store that will allow the infrastructure organisations to streamline the way in which they manage data. There will be a reduction in the amount of updating needed, and a reduction in duplication and repetition. Information gained from research projects and surveys will be entered into the system and be available to all of the infrastructure organisations. The system will foster an environment of collaboration and will enable the voluntary sector in York and North Yorkshire to develop better working practices as regards to collaboration on data projects. It is hoped that this will have an effect on the collaboration of the sector as a whole, and provide a key tool for future projects.

More information: www.nyfvo.org.uk/changeup