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Learn how to collect data online
đź’– Love data entry? Please don’t come along to our free webinar.
Everyone else: you can collect evaluation and outcome data direct from people online. Send them a link, and skip having to key it in yourself. Find out more in our FREE webinar on Thursday 1st at midday. Register in the Hub – even if you can’t make it, and we’ll send a link to the recording afterwards.
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
Tweak: collect feedback data directly
Most people tend to love a story, whether it’s written, being shared, you’re reading or listening to one. A story helps to paint a picture and shows life from a different angle.
Funders are no different; case studies and testimonials of the true impact you are making to the people/organisations you work with showcases your work and enhances the statistics you’re also sharing with them.
But you’re busy, getting feedback is hard, and even if you do send surveys out, the paperwork is another admin job that is hard to make a priority around everything else.
Our Data Direct module has been designed to help with that. Send people surveys online and their responses are fed directly back into Lamplight – data in, without the data entry. Of course the scope is much larger than just feedback forms…come and join us for our Free webinar where we introduce this time-saving module. Thursday 1st December at 12pm – book your place in the Hub
This is another of those “there must be a better way” things. Can you pause for a few minutes to try out a new approach that’s going to save you time and hassle down the line?
Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash 5Ying Ge (@yingzge) | Unsplash Photo Community
Do you make time to tweak?
I once spent a summer working in an orange juice factory, screwing the caps on bottles, sorting the fruit, lugging boxes around, that sort of thing. One day we ran out of the usual cardboard boxes and had to use these boxes that were too big for the bottles. But the lines kept running, the bottles needed to go somewhere, people needed their juice. So the bigger boxes had to do.
But when we put the bigger boxes through the taping machine the boxes got squashed, because the bottles didn’t fill the boxes. So then the supervisor had to get a bunch of us with hand-held tape guns to seal up the boxes, to try and keep up with the flow of juice bottles. We weren’t really keeping up.
This is not the most exciting story you’ll hear today, I’ll be honest.
Stood there taping boxes, I realised that if we adjusted the taping machine and put the boxes of juice through on their side they should get taped up without getting bashed and broken. But – the drama – how do we change the machine while keeping up? What if it doesn’t work out? Orange juice everywhere, irritated supervisor, and possible demotion back to the milk bottling factory?
I went for it, and lucky for me the reconfigured box-taping machine worked, we caught up, and all the extra box-tapers could return to their regular roles.
I’ve always had a “there’s got to be a better way to do that… ” itch, which is partly how Lamplight came to be in the first place. But it can be hard to spot the things that need tweaking. And harder still to find the time to reconfigure things to work just a bit better, especially if you’re not sure it’ll work out. Although even if it doesn’t, you understand the problem better by having tried.
Do you have a mental list of “if only I had the time” tweaks and changes you’d like to make to your processes? Or does it become too disorientating to be constantly fiddling, especially with systems and people more complex than taping up boxes? Or do you have to do a full business case before changing anything?
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash
Are you new here?
New to Lamplight? Or just been a while and you’d like a quick refresher? We run free webinars every month for folk who would like a getting started tour. And the next one is this Friday, the 25th November at 2pm.
Join Katie and Rusel from Lamplight as they guide you through the basics and help you find your bearings. You can sign up in the Hub (you’ll need to login first).
And did I mention it’s free?
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
Training Email newsletter – grab it while you can!
Want to know what Lamplight training is coming up? Or make sure you get our free webinars in your diary?
Some of you will have received our Training email this week. But others, it pains us to say, may not have done.
Fortunately, you can read it online here, and subscribe in system admin in Lamplight, or directly here.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Want a hand?
Are you feeling like you have too many hats, always swapping from one to the next? Is oversight of Lamplight one that’s weighing on you?
Maybe we can help a bit. We’ve been thinking about how we can support customers that do need a bit more of a hand. When being ‘the database person’ is just one more responsibility you don’t have the time or inclination for. And where you time is more valuably spent elsewhere. When you’ve already got plenty of things to be thinking about and need a Lamplight expert on hand.
The Account Manager service is there for you. Two Lamplight experts on hand when you need it. We’ll make sure we know you and your system so that when anything comes up we can take care of it. New service needs some new fields? Give us a call. Trustees added a new reporting requirement? Let us know.
Your Account Manager will aim to get back to you within a couple of hours and guide you through whatever it is.
Want to find out more?
There’s a bit more info here, or drop Clare a line at clare@lamplightdb.co.uk and talk it through.
Photo by David Vilches on Unsplash
There is so much to think about
Running an organisation is hard. Especially at the moment. And sometimes I wonder if running a small organisation is harder than a big one.
There’s more at stake in a larger organisation, I guess – all the numbers are bigger. But you also have more resources available – a head of HR, an IT Director and so on that you can call on. In a small organisation, more often than not, you wear all of those hats and a dozen others.
I don’t have the time or inclination to become an HR expert, so at Lamplight we outsource that to Citrus HR, who provide helpful, knowledgeable advice when we need it. When a question comes up, the time we don’t have to spend figuring it out is well worth the cost of the service. No to mention the costs of doing things wrong.
Now we’ve always wanted Lamplight to be something that you can do yourself. We wanted to be different to the suppliers that didn’t provide any control over the system, and would charge you to add a field or report or something. We want to empower and enable our customers.
But we’ve also come to recognise that’s not for everyone. That actually wearing lots of hats can be exhausting. For some people, it’s not empowerment, it’s a burden.
Is this familiar? How do you decide what to outsource and pay for, and what to figure out yourself as you go? What’s the first thing you would you like to hand over if you could?
We’d love to know how you different non-profits approach this – ping us @LamplightDb or LinkedIn
Image from Oxford Covered Market by Kamyar Adl License
New! Custom Date Ranges and Item Limits for Diary Feeds
Your Lamplight diary can be synchronised with external diaries such as Outlook or Gmail calendars. It can be a great way of checking your upcoming appointments without having to log into the database. If you didn’t know about it or haven’t set it up yet, check out our video about diary feeds on Vimeo.
If you’ve been using them already, you may have noticed that appointments were synced a month in advance and two weeks retrospectively. A new feature lets you adjust that so you can see appointments in your diary feed up to 60 days into the future. This makes it possible to see what’s coming up further ahead, and to plan around it.
We have also enabled control over the number of items that can be synced. You may not need to change this—especially if you stick with the default period—but it could help improve loading times and prevent compatibility issues.
Read All About It!
OK, you may have done already. Our customer newsletter hit the email doormats last Friday but if you’re one of the unlucky ones that haven’t subscribed yet, you can catch up here: https://mailchi.mp/lamplightdb/your-updates-from-lamplight
Learn about new features in the system, upcoming training, webinars and support, and a report on the Charity Digital Skills Report.
You can manage your subscriptions to our email newsletters from within the system – go to system admin > Your Account. Or sign up directly here.
Go Deep in Reporting
Last chance in ’22 – a really deep dive into reporting in Lamplight. The course runs from 10am to 4pm with just three other participants, upi have the time to really go into depth, learn from each other, and pick the brains of Max, one of our most experienced team members.
You’ll finish the course confident in your ability to produce the reports you need, with a really deep understanding of how to get what you need from Lamplight.
And you’ll pick up a whole bunch of tips to make your life easier next time reports are due. We’ll help you see how you can use templates and tags, and combining different reporting functionality, to get what you need quickly and reliably.
If you have main responsibility for reporting but feel a bit daunted or unsure, this course is for you.