- Action for Blind People
- Aquila Way
- Customer quotes
- Directory of Social Change
- Dreams Come True
- Evangelical Alliance
- Farleigh Hospice
- Farleigh Hospice business
- Lincolnshire Wildlife
- One Parent Families
- Perennial
- RSA
- Shakespeare's Globe
- SightSavers International
- Soil Association
- SSAFA Forces Help
- St Raphael's Hospice
- Sussex Wildlife
- The Children's Trust
- Thrive
- Vision Aid Overseas
The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust is a voluntary charitable organisation which cares for Lincolnshire's wildlife and countryside. It is one of 47 similar Wildlife Trusts covering the UK which are affiliated to the Royal Society for Nature Conservation.
The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust is one of the oldest of these county trusts, having been founded in 1948. The Trust covers the whole of the historic county of Lincolnshire - from the Humber to the Wash. The Trust collaborates closely with many official and voluntary organisations including English Nature and the Countryside Agency, County and District Councils, the Country Landowners and Business Association, the Environment Agency and many others.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust has used Progress since 2002 and in summer 2004 they undertook a project to introduce a new way of capturing information on volunteers. Karen Lowiss is Finance and Membership Officer at Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust and explains how they approached the volunteers project.
"We are very lucky at Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust in that we have a large volunteer force, and people regularly coming forward to offer their help, but we did not have one central location for recording volunteer details. Each department had their own record of people who volunteered for them, which of course meant that people who volunteered for several departments could have their details held in more than one place.
"This was leading to duplication and the possibility of some information being out of date. As many of our volunteers were already members it made sense to combine our current membership database, Progress, with a volunteer database as then all name and address details would be correct and we would have one central system for everybody to access."
"We decided to use Progress to record volunteer's skills and preferences, the roles that they hold within the Trust, and also some basic medical and next of kin information. Hours worked and projects completed, was already covered in detail by another database within the reserves department so this wasn't necessary in Progress.
"We have over 150 sites plus various teams and committees and needed a system which could monitor and produce reports detailing who worked at each site, what roles each individual held and of course have the facility to mailmerge details for memos, letters, minutes, agendas etc. Progress was ideal for all of this.
"Not only could all these areas be linked but contact history could be used for follow up notes, reminders etc. As well as recording information on existing volunteers we also wanted to record offers of help and then follow these up when a suitable volunteer position became available. For these offers, we wanted to be able to record not only type of work preferred, but also their experience, their availability and location and to be able to select on these fields accordingly."
"Once we had decided to use Progress to record our volunteer information we contacted our Account Manager at Fisk Brett and talked through our ideas. A consultant from Fisk Brett then came up to explore with us exactly how this would work within Progress. This was a particularly useful meeting as it was an opportunity to discuss not only what we wanted and the feasibility of it, but also for us to be given suggestions and ideas of other features that we may find useful. Requirements for reports and queries were also a major consideration in this meeting. A timescale was then set for development and testing."
"To record the volunteer information we decided to split it into three separate user defined tabs - skills, roles, and emergency contact, all created by Fisk Brett. After initial development and installation of the tabs a period of 2-3 weeks was given for testing. This was extremely beneficial. As part of the project Fisk Brett also produced the report templates for us and modified our Query and Export dictionaries to allow us to query on the volunteer information. We are now beginning to enter all the data which will be quite a lengthy job as we have several hundreds of volunteers. The next stage is to train all the staff on how to use Progress and to develop more reports.
"We are delighted with the whole project and how smoothly it all went and are looking forward to using the database to the full."
For more information on Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust visit www.lincstrust.co.uk
