We’ve decided to make the communications module available for free to any customer that needs to add it to their system, for at least the next 3 months. We hope this will be helpful if you are changing the way you work and need to stay in touch with your service users and supporters in different ways. We’ve done a short introductory video to help you get it set up.
Other changes we’ve made:
You can add modules to your system via the system admin menu > Customise Lamplight > Add or remove modules.
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.
Updated 17/3/2020
In the light of yesterday’s advice from Government we will (from 17/3) not be carrying out on-site visits except in exceptional circumstances.
Working remotely.
We have been using video conferencing effectively with customers – we’re liking zoom.us and Amazon Chime, and we still use Google Hangouts. You don’t need to install any software at your end – it works in the Chrome web browser pretty well. There is extra functionality if you do install the software, though, and Zoom offer a free usage plan.
We are closing our offices this week and are working from home, so you’ll still be able to get in touch as normal if you need to.
Open Training
We have cancelled the planned open training day in London and are providing alternative training for participants that had booked on it. We will review future dates nearer the date in light of the situation at the time.
Official guidance
The Government guidance for businesses and employers is at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-to-employers-and-businesses-about-covid-19/guidance-for-employers-and-businesses-on-covid-19 Guidance for charities from NCVO is available at https://www.ncvo.org.uk/practical-support/information/coronavirus
Review
We will review this policy at least every few days as the situation develops and update it as necessary.
We’ve added a new feature over the weekend which allows you to click on a number in a work report to see a list of the people or work records that have been included. Simply run a report as usual, click on a number in the ‘number of people’ or ‘number of sessions’ column, and you’ll see a little popup with them listed. Each item in the list is a link, so clicking on one will open the profile or record and you can view it.
At the same time, we’ve added a little trick that’ll make cross-checking things a bit easier too. If you hold down the ‘shift’ key on the keyboard and click a name in the list, the profile will open up in a new window. This means you can double-check the profile details while still keeping the report on your main screen.
If you want to find out more, why not watch our short introductory video?
On Wednesday 5th February our office will be closed for a team training day. This means that we won’t be available for routine queries. We will, however, be monitoring our system to ensure it’s running smoothly. We apologise for any inconvenience, and will be back to business as usual on 6th.
We’ve been working on a major improvement to the parts of system admin which let you manage drop-down lists, and this is now available in all systems.
For anyone who has updated custom tabs and fields, outcomes, drop-down lists, or evaluations in system admin, you’ll notice a change straight away. Our update makes it easier to add and edit items, as well as to change the order of items that are already there.
We’ve prepared an information sheet showing the main controls that you’ll find in the updated pages. There are also some short videos explaining different aspects which you can find in section 52.4 of our help pages (you need to be logged in to a Lamplight system for this link to work). Our help pages have also been updated – you can find a wealth of information, including how general lists work, and working with custom tabs and fields. (you need to be logged in to a system for these links to work).
We’ll be having a video meeting for any system admins who want to come and find out more on Monday 3rd January from 10 a.m. to 10.30. Do let us know if you’d like to join in, and we can send you the details.
Here are Lamplight we’re always keen to find ways to make your experience of our system better, and support easier.
We’re rolling out a new option for some support calls and other planned meetings which allows you to share your screen with us. We’ve wanted to do this for a while because it means that when you have a problem you can show us exactly what is happening, but we never want to ask you to download new software onto your system, or create an account with a third party service.
We’ve now found Amazon Chime. To use it, we can create a unique web link which you open in a new web browser tab. We can then share screens, either showing you what is on our screen, or asking to see yours. There are no downloads or extensions to add, you don’t have to login to anything (you just type in your name and click ‘next’), and we can only ever see what you show us. We can’t access your data independently, nothing is recorded or stored, and we cannot take control of your system. Once the session ends so does the screenshare.
We will only ask to do this when we think it would be useful in resolving your issue, or for showing you something in Lamplight. It will always be your choice whether we do this or not. If you do want to, we will email you with details of the web link. And we won’t contact you out of the blue and ask – this will always be in the context of a question you’ve asked us, or on-going implementation or training.
We have been trialling it over the last few weeks and it has worked well, helping us to resolve issues faster and make training sessions more interactive.
If you are looking at activity records this morning you may notice a cosmetic change to the filter bar. We’ve done this to make it a little more obvious that you can click to change what you see in the table.
It was accompanied by a couple of minor changes to groups. You can now filter activity records by up to 24 months (rather than 12 previously), and you can also specify “up to 5 of…” for multi-select fields.
We’ve cut a third off the price of our reporting training day in central Birmingham on Monday 18th November. Birmingham is a new venue for us which sadly has not had as much interest as we’d hoped. Although it is undersubscribed the venue is still booked, so we’ve decided to let our Lamplighters reap the benefit and offer remaining places at a discount.
We have reduced the price to £145 per person, so if you’ve been thinking about training, or would like to hone your skills, now’s the time! This still includes training in an IT suite with all materials provided, and a two hour support pack to help you put your learning into practice.
On the day we will cover the best ways to get information out of Lamplight, and how to check the quality of data being put into the system. After this your support pack gives you two hours of 1:1 phone support where we help you to apply the learning to your own system and build the reports and lists that you need.
This offer is for our training in central Birmingham on Monday 18th November at Highbury Apprenticeships, Quayside Tower, Broad Street, B1 2HF.
To book a place, just email us: hello@lamplightdb.co.uk.
You can find out more about open training on our website: http://www.lamplightdb.co.uk/open-training-days/.
An update last night sees some improvements to outcomes. We’ve changed the layout of the main ‘activity > add > outcome’ screen slightly to make it clearer. If you are using an established outcomes framework that includes descriptors for individual scores, you’ll see there are now drop downs that give you the meanings of the number scores.
If you have any ‘calculated outcomes’ – where Lamplight works out a sub-total or total score for you – you’ll see in individual profiles you can now view these on their own radar chart (which works best when there are several sub-totals) – but the animation showing change over time may also be helpful.
Also on outcomes, if you show full details in a data view, Yes/No outcomes will be shown as ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ instead of 1 or 0 (though you’ll need to edit and save the data view first for this to take effect).
There’s also a new option in the relationships section of data views: ‘Name and contact details for download’. This gives you the same information as the ‘Name and contact details’ option – the address, phone and email of the related profile. The difference is that it separates it with a | symbol (the one next to Z on regular keyboards), and empty fields are included. This all means that if you use the view and download it, you can use the ‘text to columns’ functionality to split up the data and it’ll all be lined up properly (choose ‘delimited’ and enter the | symbol as the delimiter).
A couple of other tweaks in this update: