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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)

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When we wrote the original blog post about the impact of City Angels we tried to find some statistics about Accident and Emergency admissions in Chichester as another indicator on their impact.  We couldn’t find the sort of data we needed – it had to be for Friday nights only and anything that was there didn’t seem to be freely available or at the right level of detail.

But City Angels have just been told that Friday night admissions last year were down a massive 61%.  Particularly given the recent anxiety about A&E resources that’s a really significant impact.

With our data-nerds hats on, we were also really excited that City Angels had received additional funding to start operating on Saturday nights – which would seem a good thing for Chichester – but also because it provides a natural experiment over two years.

In fact, at the moment they’re operating on Friday nights every week, and every other week on Saturdays – so hopefully later in the year they’ll be able to get police and health data comparing ‘on’ and ‘off’ Saturdays.

And one other snippet of impact – some of their new volunteers are people who’ve previously been helped by the Angels on a Friday night.

It’s a reminder to us that really compelling evidence of the impact you have doesn’t necessarily need to involve big and complex (and expensive) studies.  You may already be unwittingly carrying out a natural experiment of this sort, and just need a little bit of data and analysis to discover the results.