Projects
Projects categorise all activity recorded using Charitylog. Understanding the concept of Projects is vital to having a good grasp of how the Charitylog system works as a whole.
Projects are a key way to categorise information when producing reports, 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.
