One Parent Families

The National Council for One Parent Families operates the Lone Parent Helpline, a national service, providing support and information to 17,000 callers last year - a statistic that was easy to produce, thanks to their newly developed call logging system.

As part of an organisational wide policy to improve information management and enhance their IT infrastructure, One Parent Families approached Fisk Brett to develop a new, call logging package for helpline and advice workers to use.

Natasha Benenson, Head of Direct Services recalls, "we used to have only a handwritten call monitoring system and input rudimentary information into an Excel spreadsheet each month. This was really time consuming and involved a lot of duplicate effort.

"We wanted to develop a system that would improve our method of recording and monitoring calls, allowing us to properly capture names and addresses and make sending information to callers much easier.

The system also needed to enable us to dynamically refer callers to their nearest advice agencies, comply with Data Protection Act and our own confidentiality policy, as well as be quick and easy to use!"

As many THA members have found, there are a mind-boggling number of database suppliers and packages in the market, yet a frustrating drought of solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of helpline organisations in this way.

Natasha explains, "we knew what we wanted to achieve was ambitious, but Fisk Brett were good at understanding our requirements and we felt strongly that commissioning a new system would ultimately save us a great deal of time and money."

Developing Helplinepro was quite a lengthy process - it took 18 months to design, write, trial and revise, from start to ‘go live' date.

Natasha continues "there were lots of meetings to evaluate our old methods and determine the specific categories of data we'd record - caller types, call issues, resulting actions etc. It was a completely new way of working and we were sometimes quite anxious.

"We identified a few key concerns about changing from a paper based to a computerised call monitoring system that needed to be addressed. Staff worried that technology would complicate things, that it would be hard to give callers their full attention while capturing data, and that calls would be lost if the system was too slow or unwieldy to use.

"However, we worked closely with Fisk Brett, their training was good and gave our team plenty of time to familiarise themselves with how the system worked. Everyone liked it and really appreciated the ability to record more information than in the past.

"The program uses simple click-through screens to record information, which streamlines the call logging process considerably and acts as a visual shorthand for our operators. Referring callers to their nearest advice agency is easy - we can quickly search by postcode and automatically log who we are signposting to most often.

"In addition, we've cut down on manual effort needed to mail out publications and less paper work has proved good for staff morale. Helplinepro generates labels which means no more writing out envelopes!

"We also have the option to record details about anonymous calls, which is important to us. Calls can be sensitive and we always ask callers if we may keep their details before doing so. If they do not give us consent, their details are purged once any information leaflets they requested have been sent, ensuring confidentiality.

"The system has dramatically increased our ability to generate accurate statistics to help us evaluate our services. We can better address the needs of lone parents by monitoring call and caller trends and take up areas. Fundraising also benefit from improved stats for funding applications.

"We've also noticed that lone parent membership has increased substantially from a few hundred to 3000 since we have been recording names and addresses of callers and inviting them to join. This has helped significantly increase our income and makes us more representative of lone parents, thus giving us greater authority as a campaigning organisation."

Andy Keen-Downs, Deputy Director of the charity concludes, "Helplinepro, and an integrated approach to IT continues to improve our effectiveness as an ally to lone parents and their children, and fully supports our role as an independent authoritative source of information and advice."

For more information on One Parent Families, visit

www.oneparentfamilies.org.uk