Name of Organisation
The Play Centre
Sector
Childcare
Location
Sherwood, Nottingham
Business Partner
Perot Systems Corporation
Type of business support
The Play Centre provides a unique facility which offers practical help, support and information for parents and caregivers of children and young people through the provision of play sessions, training, support for families to access community facilities and assessments in play.
They need to keep in touch with over 1000 people - families, professionals and other organisations - regularly mailing out newsletters and information about training courses and workshops, covering all aspects of play and behaviour management. Using a manual admin system was no longer viable!
Nottingham ProHelp member, Perot Systems Corporation used their software development expertise to computerise the previously manual systems used by the Play Centre.
Costs and Resources involved
Staff from Perot initially visited the Play Centre to find out more. Jacky Huson, Funding and Marketing Co-ordinator at the Play Centre says, "I was very impressed how Lisa and Tracy grasped how we worked and what we needed, asking very searching questions - all entered straight onto a laptop by Lisa. They then produced a feasibility proposal, design brief and framework of delivery to be approved by their management - this was a nail-biting time as we were by now, feeling excited by the prospect of a database becoming a reality".
A couple more meetings ironed out and refined the system and they completed four more versions of the database before officially signing off the project. Another Perot representative, Helen, delivered a couple of training sessions to Stuart Furley, Admin Assistant on how to design and amend reports and deal with queries.
Benefits of involvement
Jacky Huson, Funding and Marketing Co-ordinator and Stuart Furley, Admin Assistant at the Play Centre arey delighted with their brand new database. "No more writing envelopes by hand!" cheers Jacky, "and quicker access to monitoring figures - with about 600 families using the Play Centre during a year, keeping in touch with them and providing monitoring figures for our funders was fast becoming an administrative nightmare.
"What was stunning was that neither Lisa nor Helen were trained in Access before they started this project, so it was steep learning curve for them too. It has been a privilege to work closely with such professionally skilled people and we are deeply grateful to ProHelp for putting us in contact with Perot."
How was the link established?
The Play Centre contacted their local ProHelp group in Nottingham asking for some help with their IT systems, they were put in touch with Perot Systems Corporation who are members of the ProHelp group.
