Along with many other small charities, Beat SCAD is run by volunteers in their spare time, so we are always on the lookout for opportunities to make some of the admin tasks less time-consuming.
When we needed help automating a labour-intensive task, we posted a volunteer opportunity on Ethical Angel. Volunteer Rosie Wood (pictured), who worked for journal publisher Frontiers offered to help.
Ethical Angel is an employee volunteering service that matches volunteers from employers who want to enable staff to volunteer to help charities looking for help. Volunteers are supported by their employers and Rosie was able to do some of the work during her working day.
The project
Beat SCAD uses a database to store information provided to us by SCAD patients, families and healthcare professionals, so we can keep people up to date with our activities as well as collect data to help us campaign for better care for patients.
The process of getting the information from our Keep in touch form into this database was very labour-intensive so automating this process was a priority so we could spend that valuable time on other areas of our mission.
Two of the Trustees, Karen Rockell and Debbie Oliver, had discussions with Rosie about the charity and the data we collect. Rosie then did some work to create a new Keep in touch form that would produce data in a format that allowed fields to be automatically matched in the database.
At every stage of the project, Rosie kept us up to date with what she was doing. We tested the process throughout and Rosie was always happy to take in changes and tweaks.
The result
Thanks to Rosie, we now have an automated process, which is saving the Trustees a lot of time, and we are very grateful to Rosie and Ethical Angel for all the help they have given us.
