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(Update: 2/4/20): The various Lottery funders have announced funding.  The Heritage fund has funding for existing or recent grantees. Sport England is doing the same, and also has a fund for activities to help people stay active.  The Community Fund has a Covid-19 page with updates on what they are doing.

Still nothing sector specific from Government, but some hints that something’s coming.

Civil Society has a longer list of funders, including these and other sources (added 27/03)

We’ve seen a few sources of funding for charities affected by Coronavirus and/or working with people directly affected (updated 23/3):

Martin Lewis / Money Saving Expert – £5k – £20k for poverty relief. Deadline 25th March, funding to be released quickly.

Watch the National Emergencies Trust – currently raising funds, to be distributed through Community Foundations.  Again this is to support work supporting people directly affected (guidelines on their site).

The Mayor of London and City Bridge Trust have launched an emergency fund to support charities directly affected – sign up on their site for updates next week.  The Steve Morgan Foundation is offering funding for charities in Liverpool, Cheshire and North Wales.  Local Waitrose stores have access to £1m emergency funding for local groups.  The Oxfordshire Community Foundation has some local funding available from the Indigo Trust.

NCVO are lobbying for additional support for the sector and they have also made their KnowledgeBase resources available for free. Also worth watching for volunteering support.

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We know from talking to you all that keeping your data safe is a big issue.

You may have seen that the Information Commissioner’s Office has had six times more data breaches reported by charities in the first quarter of 2018 than for the same time the previous year. A large part of this rise will be down to the new data protection regulations which have been introduced. If you’re interested in the detail of their findings, you can download the data from their website here. It shows that the highest incidence of data breaches happens through phishing attacks. The best defence against phishing is staff awareness, so it’s worth considering training all staff on this if you’ve not done so.

The second highest incidence of data breaches is by unauthorised access, so when you’re thinking about the security of your Lamplight database don’t forget to remove database operator access to your system from staff and volunteers who no longer work for you. Deleting them from the database operators’ table will mean that they can’t log in to Lamplight, but all the records that you have for them will remain intact.  You may want to make sure you have this as part of your leavers process, or schedule in a regular review of operators.

For support with data security more generally you may find the National Cyber Security Centre’s resources for small charities useful. They also provide a handy one-page reminder that can be downloaded. There is also an interesting report (if you’re so minded!) on ICO information risk reviews at eight charities, which you can find here.

 

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It’s always lovely to revisit a Lamplighter who has been using the system for a little while and going to Brighton for a training day with Family Support Work was no different. Their services and therefore their team has expanded and so new team members needed training on Lamplight.

The afternoon session had an added dimension as some of their team, who are already familiar with data entry in Lamplight, joined the training. The conversation naturally went to talking about the existing data in the system.

Family Support Work are an organisation committed to measuring impact. They use Lamplight to record the impact and track the change and the journeys of the families they work with over time.

On the training day I was able to show them both how to view the outcomes per family and client, and also the reporting over many clients. We identified the percentage of people in their deanery area who have seen positive change in their physical health. We looked at the average days to see one point of positive change and how much time invested in families was therefore needed. And this was just the beginning.

It highlighted to them the usefulness of completing the outcomes to support their families, as well as the potential in proving their impact to themselves and others.

It highlighted to me, that running in-house reports can be quick and easy to achieve in Lamplight and importantly can have massive benefit to staff to encourage them in the work they do.

If you’re interested in doing this for your own team, please talk to us about setting up report templates to make this process more efficient.

 

 

(Images used are from a demo site)