Deskspace Charity Solutions

This central London based Charity supplied services to a wide range of recipients. It had mailing lists comprising many thousands of names gathered over a decade which it used intensively to achieve it's objectives. A core of full time staff and a variety of part timers and volunteers worked together on a wide variety of projects. They had an existing database which was complex to use, so only a few specialists were able to use it, and wanted to upgrade their computers but the old database was not supported to make the technology jump to modern equipment.

In addition, part of the charity had developed its own database so that many contacts were now in two different systems.

The Charity obtained substantial funding from government departments and other donors on a project by project basis and was required to report on the outcomes resulting from the work they undertook with each tranche of funding. Compiling those reports, or audits, was a complex and time consuming business.

Deskspace built an Integrated Information Software System for the charity, "Deskspace NFP Pro" which was designed to enable everyone to use the same information system, but with 5 different permitted types of user and a very flexible administrator controlled means of determining who could see what personal and confidential information. Under the data protection legislation the charity had, for example, to control which of their staff were permitted access to ethnicity data collected from clients and staff personal information.

Deskspace NFP Pro enabled a very wide range of data to be collected on those they dealt with, which could then form the basis of a sophisticated reporting system, saving senior staff a great deal of work in compiling audits. The system enabled a limitless number of Mailing Lists to be maintained with easy and intuitive means of adding people to lists or removing them.

Every user had a variety of different means of finding, marking and refinding records throughout the system providing a powerful and flexible means of working for both charity professionals and part timers and volunteers.