Projects (Administrator guide)
Contents
Overview of Projects
This chapter will be short, but important. Understanding the concept of Projects is vital to having a good grasp of how the Charitylog system works as a whole.
Recording activity is useless unless there is some way to make use of this information. A key principle is to be able to categorise information, for example -
- "All work done for this client" - categorising by client
- "All work done in this time period" - categorising by date
- "All work done by the Daycare service" - categorising by Project.
Any information recorded in Charitylog needs to be recorded "under" a Project, and you will need to set these Projects up before you can start using your system. It's common that each service your organisation delivers will have one Project set up for it. Typical Projects like this would be;
- Daycare
- Activity Groups
- Information and Advice
and so on. These usually cover the majority of work an organisation does with clients, but there may be more projects required if you want to capture statistics on all your organisation's activity - which you probably do. You might need some extra projects like;
- Volunteers (to record activity with volunteers, rather than clients)
- Front Desk (for reception staff to record their interactions with clients)
- Marketing (to record contacts with local press etc)
You can see that Projects are more than just a list of the services your organisation provides - although this is a big part of the picture. The Projects on your system serve to categorise all activity recorded, so in this way, they are more like categories than anything else.
Every action recorded on your Charitylog system is linked to one Project and one Organisation/Person (most commonly, a client).
This Project and Organisation/Person may be carried on to several actions, which we call a Referral. In this case, the whole Referral (chain of actions) is linked to one Project and one Org/Person. A Referral cannot be under more than one Project and it cannot be with more than one person. Many members of staff might get involved with the referral, but the subject of the referral - usually a client - remains constant.
Setting up Projects
To set up a new project, or edit an existing one, click the "Project Set Up" menu item, which can be found in Administration > Projects and Referral Entries.
This menu item will take you to a screen where you can see the projects already set up on your system, if there are any.
As you can see, there are several set up on the demonstration system. To create a new one, click the "Enter New Project" button at the top of the screen. You will be taken to the first in a series of tabs where you can enter information about your new project.
