VAW specification

This specification is a working document for use by VAW and Third Sector Design outlining functionality for VAW's CiviCRM database.

Development of this functionality will take place during phase 1, unless it is marked as "Desirable", or "Phase 2".

***Please format suggestions with bold italics for review. ***

Organisation information

To map the state of the voluntary and community sector.

Organization fields

* denotes that this field is viewable in the public directory

Contact details

Organisation name *

• Postal address
• Telephone *
• Secondary telephone
• Email *
• Fax
• Website *
• First point of contact selected from person records used for generic organizational mailings and as named person on the directory*

Organisational profile

• Free text description of organisation's activities including basic formatting *
• Sector
  • voluntary
  • statutory
  • private
  • education
  • Residents association
• Annual income
  • Null
  • No income
  • £0-£5,000
  • £5-£10,000
  • £10,000-£25,000
  • £25,000-£50,000
  • £50,000-£200,000
  • £200,000-£500,000
  • £500,000-£1million
  • £1-5million
  • £5million+
• Client groups (current list, with possible modification) *
• Services provided (current list, with possible modification) *
• Faith organization (Y/N/Unknown) 
• Geographic focus
  • International
  • National
  • London
  • Westminster
  • Specific wards within Westminster (tick wards that apply below)
    • Abbey Road
    • Bayswater
    • Bryanston and Dorset Square
    • Church Street
    • Churchill
    • Harrow Road
    • Hyde Park
    • Knightsbridge and Belgravia
    • Lancaster Gate
    • Little Venice
    • Maida Vale
    • Marylebone High Street
    • Queen's Park
    • Regent's Park
    • St James's
    • Tachbrook
    • Vincent Square
    • Warwick
    • West End
    • Westbourne

• Number of full time staff

• Number of part time staff

• Number of trustees

• Number of volunteers

• Number of volunteer hours per week

• Number of beneficiaries

• Number of Westminster beneficiaries

• Consent to publish in public directory
  • (Y/N/unknown)
  • Hide phone number
  • Hide email
  • Hide address
  • Hide primary contact name

• Governance structure
  • Informal group with no rules or constitution
  • Voluntary group with constitution
  • Company limited by guarantee
  • Industrial and provident society or friendly society
  • Community interest company
  • None of the above

• Registered charity number

• Main sources of funding
  • Westminster Council contracts
  • Westminster PCT contracts
  • Earned income
  • Charitable trusts
  • Donations
  • Central government grants
  • Other grants
  • Westminster Voluntary Sector Unit grants

• Pigeon hole user
  • Chapel Street
  • Pimlico

Support

To be replaced by health check in phase 2

Support meetings, phonecalls, etc, are recorded as activities:

• The date and duration of support sessions can be recorded
• Instances of support amendable retrospectively
• Instances of support can be coded with reporting tags ("funding application", "Big Lottery funded", "involving service-users").
• Reporting tags easy to alter
• Follow-up work relating to a particular instance of support (for example, to work on a funding bid) can be referred to staff members (continuing the example, a reminder to call the group in two months to check whether the bid was successful)
• Method of delivery can be recorded for each instance of support (meeting, phone call, email, etc) Update to these new categories
• The database displays the date of paying services, rather than the date of the booking (as with support records
• Activities that have been assigned to one member of staff can be re-assigned to another

Desirable: follow up email on what did you do with this advice six months later

Phase 2: The health check

To be considered after implementing Support (phase 1)

This is a way of showing an organizations level of development by through a number of milestones and activities associated with reaching these milestones.  A general layout for activities carried out with organizations that allows the database to be focused around VAW's organizational processes.  It is a framework that capacity builders can use to guide their work with groups - a dummies guide to capacity building.

The healthcheck is split into the following themes

• Governance
• Core policies
• Management
• Communications
• Financial systems
• Fundraising
• HR and volunteers
• User involvement
• Partnership working
  

Each theme has three levels of competence (corresponding to beginners, intermediate and advanced).  To achieve any of these levels of competence, groups need to show that they have achieved specific milestones.  For example, to achieve a level one in the Policy theme, a group might need to show that they have a child protection policy, an equal opportunity policy and a health & safety policy. 

Milestones can be assigned a red, amber or green status:

• Red is non-achieved. 

• Amber indicates where a group has a policy, but the VAW officer has not checked its fitness for purpose

• Green indicates that a group has a policy, and its fitness for purpose has been approved by VAW

Activities can be assigned to each milestone.  These are like normal activities and include the name of the person delivering the activity, a description, and a set of custom tags that apply to that particular activity.

For each milestone, there are links to the relevant pages in the VAW website/learn more library

Funding

Phase 2: Have a specific place to upload info about groups successful funding applications (inc. a place for amount etc).

Individual information

Individual information fields

• Prefix
• First name
• Surname
• Job title
• Position in organisation (volunteer, trustee, staff member, other, na)
• Email
• Phone
• Mobile
• Fax
• Custom address
• Mailing list subscriptions
• Contact preferences (don't email, don't call, don't mail)

Desirable: can define relationships using edit individual page (e.g. trustee of organisation X)

Individual tabs

Summary of services delivered (training, event attendance, meeting room bookings)

Addresses

Uses organizational address by default.  Ability to use personal address.  Street address, city and postcode are required fields

LINks

(LINks stands for local involvement in health network.)

Membership

Individuals can join the LINk.

Organizations can join LINk (in this case, they have a nominated representative).

Membership records the following information about the membership

• involvement preferences
• Conflict of interest
• CRB check
  • Date applied for
  • Date received

Issues

Issues are a type of activity (see activities above). They can be recorded against any person on the database, including anonymous links person

Issues have the following custom data

• tagged with fields taken from current issues database
• method of contact 
  • phone
  • email
  • website
  • public meeting

Issues can be assigned to workgroups

Workgroups

Workgroups are recorded in the database as organisations and have the tag Workgroups

Individuals and organizations can join workgroups

Cases can be carried out by workgroups

LINks admins can record activities associated with workgroups (from the case display page)

LINks cases can involve more than one organization and individual.  They consist of activities relating to these individuals.

Workgroups can be active or inactive

Activities carried out by work groups can be assigned reporting tags

LINKs menu

A menu with shortcuts for LINks people

• View all workgroups
• View all LINks members
• Reports

LINks reports and example mailings

• LINk membership
• Pending CRB status
• Status of persons logging issues (individual, representative of organisation, anonymous)
• Method of logging contact
• Issues selected by tag (displaying headline and (optionally) summary text)
• Issues selected by multiple tags (in AND and OR relationships)
• Work group membership
• Work group tasks (headline and (optionally) sub-tasks)
• Sub-tasks across all work groups, selected by tag (select all sub-tasks contributing to a particular outcome, across all work groups)

Relationships

Relationships between individuals and organizations can be recorded (i.e. staff member, trustee, volunteer, but email addresses are associated with individuals, not with specific relationships.

Data quality

Custom organisation data type "systematic update"

Traffic light system to signify when contact was last updated

• Green < 2 years

• Amber < 4 years

• red > 4 years

Red records automatically removed from the public directory

Desirable: log of what fields were changed.  Who and when is not sufficient

Membership

Adding membership - option for cash, cheque and invoice. Option to add start date for a membership delivery (rather than the start date being set automatically as the entry date - this is handy if a group sends in a membership renewal before their membership expires)

Membership report: renewal reminder (memberships to expire in the next eight weeks)
Membership report: memberships that have expired in the last four weeks 

select all organisations that were sent a membership renewal reminder, but which did not respond.

Correspondence concerning membership should be addressed to a membership contact.  (This should be the person that most recently completed a membership application form).

Make it clear from the front display page for each organisation what their current membership status is, and when it is due to expire (as the existing database does)

Membership form

the information we need on the membership form is:

• Name of person filling in form
• Contact email
• Contact telephone
• Organisation name
• Income
• Sector
• Membership type (voluntary sector (sub-divided into income brackets opposite); private sector; statutory sector)
• Payment method
• Invoice address

Membership fees

• Voluntary sector
  • £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • > £nk

Events

Option for recording attendance and non-attendance of participants booked on courses

The database offers "free-place" as an option when booking training places

The database indicates when no free places are remaining, and prohibits additional free place bookings

Event display page to show participants' organisations, attendance status and charge for their course booking

Adding event booking through person record: no need to reselect person

Cancellation time is noted

Email automatically sent to confirmed attendees which can include include terms and conditions??

Event evaluation

Attendance sheets can be produced, showing attendees and their organisation.

Searches can be done on people who attended events whose organisation matches a given profile so that they their attendance can be funded by a certain funder, if funding is available

Desirable:  Batch update for no shows

Desirable: ability to handle part payments payable/paid which is also useful for deposits for training

Events

Event fees

These apply to employees, trustees and volunteers of organisations

• Voluntary sector
  • £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • £nk - £nk
  • > £nk
• Statutory and private sector
• Individual

Membership discount of X%

Menus

Customised menus will largely follow already exisiting VAW database set up

Directory                                                                                                                           

The directory will make a number of contact fields public.

Ability to make arbitrary searchable directories, like meeting hire, ways to get your message out, etc

Mailing lists

Retention of all existing mailing lists and mailing list subscriptions.

Mailing lists can be exported to Excel

Mailings

We'd like to be able to run queries like the following: "select all organisations that were sent a sector survey mailing, but which did not respond"

Duplicate handling

When staff create new organisations and persons, can the database check existing records for near matches

Deleted contacts

Include "inactive" field

Inactive organisations hidden but not deleted

Inactive organisations can be included in searches

Inactive distinct from deleted

Reports

Report examples

• The number of groups working with BME communities that we've delivered capacity building support to in a given period
• The number of organisations we've supported to bid successfully for funding
• On the reports page, custom fields are separated into areas of work, and given their own section?
• Number of hours of capacity building offered to faith groups
• Can report on contacts added to the database over a period of time 

Custom fields have their own silver tabbed header

Searches

Contacts (i.e. individuals and organizations) can be searched for by the following criteria

• name
• Address
• Email
• Telephone number

% can be used as a wildcard

Hosting

Hosted in secure environment to prevent unauthorised access

Automatic remote and local backup.

Web statistics

Google analytics

Downloads

Resources available online to download.

Some downloads can be made available dependent on providing organisational details.

Log in

Users remain logged in indefinitely