Technology is not always the solution

Case Study: Small organisations don’t always need complex ICT

EAG are a membership organisation run by older volunteers working from home. They have very limited access to computers and little cash resource or ICT skills within the organisation.

Their vision was a single source of easily accessible data, available to all who needed it, when they needed it.

Organisational data was typically stored in a box file as paper records. The group decided to invest in a simple database and involved a volunteer to build it. With little understanding of what they needed and a volunteer focused on technological wizardry, the system soon grew to be too complex for their needs. The group couldn’t agree on exactly what they wanted and the membership administrator was showing marked reluctance to get involved.

After about six months, the organisation were presented with an Access database which recorded lots of information about their members and a whole host of detailed monitoring reports.

Unfortunately, the organisation collected only a very limited amount of data and weren’t able to fill in much of the database. The volunteers only had two computers between them and at this point one of them broke down. The database had only been installed on this computer and much of the data was lost in a hard disk crash.

Fortunately, the membership administrator had kept all the paper records and the data could be recovered.

Back to basics

Following a tense meeting, the organisation decided to go back to basics. With only a hundred members (who each completed their own membership record on a piece of paper once a year), storing the records alphabetically in a lever arch file with alphabetic subject dividers worked out well. There was no need for further data entry. The file was stored and maintained at home by the membership administrator who was able to access contact details as and when needed (usually only once a week via a phone call and never urgently).

“We realised that computers got in the way of what we wanted to do – we were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

The organisation still had to do basic monitoring – numbers of members, which borough they lived in, how old they were, which of the key three activities of the organisation they were most interested in etc. – but found with such small amounts of data it was relatively easy to count these up and add to charts and reports stored in the front of the folder. It meant there was no need to worry about computers breaking down, no problem with learning new systems and that all the data was easily available when needed.

ICT doesn’t always make things easier so make sure the tool fits the purpose and remember that not everyone will be happy to use ICT and it may cost more than it’s worth