Contact A Family

What does ‘Contact a Family’ do?
How does ‘Contact a Family’ use ICT?
What difference has ICT made?
What was learnt?
Want to find out more?

What does ‘Contact a Family’ do? 

Contact a Family is a UK wide charity whose primary aim is to reach the parents of all disabled children – no matter what their child's health condition. They provide general advice, information and support and also enable parents to get in contact with other families, both on a local and national basis, either through their helpline or a secure-web based service www.makingcontact.org.

How does ‘Contact a Family’ use ICT? 

Contact a Family allocated £50,000 to update and develop the organisation’s ICT systems. The main aims were to:

• Ensure the computers at Contact a Family had productivity software, email, web-browsing and facilities to share internal information related to CAF
• Introduce a new version of their database that would give staff access to accurate information for dealing with external enquiries. This would include  information  relating to services, support groups, other organisations and medical conditions, which were to be included in a hierarchical structure to ensure statistical and contact information was properly structured. Statistical information about enquiries to the charity also needed to be stored and managed
• Improve the organisations intranet to fulfil requirements such as:- displaying in/out status of staff, room booking and a diary sheet showing free/busy status in advance, but not the exact contents of people's office schedules.

An integration of the internal information sharing requirements, via an intranet, with the medical conditions database was proposed.  To make this as effective as possible, a web-enabled solution was discussed as this had a number of advantages which included:

• Minimal learning curve for users as people were generally familiar with a browser and website forms, rather than learning a new interface
• Single login for the intranet and database, to make it accessible remotely without the need for a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

What difference has ICT made? 

At Contact a Family ICT is now seen to be reliable and has been central in the expansion of Contact a Family's services and methods of delivery.  Staff have access to an intranet fulfilling their requirements:

• Groupware functions as well as integration with the central database.
• Other organisation information held on the intranet include items like the staff handbook and reports.  Locating the database on the webserver has meant that all staff can access the database, whilst keeping the Local Area Network (LAN) at Contact a Family's head office secure.  Latest developments include the addition of RSS feeds and virus information to pages.
• The ICT function has now expanded from 1 full-time post to include a part time assistant role to support all Contact a Family's 70-plus staff across the UK.
• Local offices have access to the organisation's database, and are gradually having their ICT upgraded (roll out of broadband, client-server networks...).  Staff not located at the head office collect their e-mail directly from head office mailservers, but, for added security, use ISP email servers for outgoing mail.

Key benefits for Contact a Family of its current architecture have been:

• Integration of ICT systems, such as the database and intranet
• High level of system reliability (e.g. the servers have not crashed in 3 years, and have only needed to be restarted 4 times and then only because of power cuts and hardware failure, with all maintenance and patches applied with the systems running).
• Implementation of Open Source software has meant that ICT systems were developed and evolved in a way exactly tuned for Contact a Family's needs.  This has been coupled with substantial cost savings compared to proprietary solutions
• External support needs have been minimised – indeed, by investing in its staff, Contact a Family has benefited by being able to draw on a wide set of skills tuned to the organisation's requirements, and thereby has been able to afford the development and support of an increasingly comprehensive set of systems
• Savings made through the use of Open Source solutions have enabled the charity to increase its effectiveness in its core activities.

What was learnt? 

Not everything went smoothly with the ICT systems development for this project, and these are felt to be the key learning points:

• ICT systems development undoubtedly benefited from buy-in at high-level, together with adequate budgeting
• Choosing an Open Source solution effectively saved the database project when things started to go wrong, and would also have been important if any member of the implementation team had been made unavailable – at worst, new developers could have been called in, with access to the software's source code
• Accurate user consultation coupled with ongoing feedback enhanced the delivered solutions
• Project management and collaborative working methods required more skill and resource than initially allocated.

Want to find out more? 

Contat name: Ryan Cartwright, IT Manager

Contact a Family,
209-211 City Road,
London
EC1V 1JN

Website address: http://www.cafamily.org.uk
Telephone: 020 7608 8700

If you would like to find out more about free and open source software, and how it might benefit your organisation, visit the open source pages of the website.

To find out more about putting together an ICT strategy, take a look at this set of Knowledgebase articles on strategy and planning.