Project Set Up

About Projects

Projects are for Referral/Cases and interactions to be group together to enable reporting. Generally projects would be similar to the services provided. If an organisation offers an Information and Advice service (including advocacy support) they would possibly consider two projects; Information & Advice and Advocacy. From here the system would be able to report on the two projects together or separately.

Projects are also used with some of the Modules available;

• Handypersons - Doing minor home adaptations
• Roster - Care Provision, Befriending and other roster type service.
• Funded Work - Funding applications for major home adaptations, from Technical visit through to completion.

Some services in an organisation my have sub services that they offer. Examples below;

• Befriending - This could offer Telephone Befriending and Home Visiting
• Counselling - Group based or individual sessions
• Carer Support Services - Adult Carers, Young Adult Carers and Young Carers.
• Advice and Support - Help line and Casework.

If there is a requirement to report on the subservices independently it may be considered to use a project for each sub service. Project design is very important and reporting is a major consideration. When reporting on a project this can be then split down into different aspects like gender, ethnic origin etc. If there is a need to analyse demographics and statistics based on the sub services that it would be recommended to use separate projects.

Projects are not just used for working with services users and can be useful in other areas of the organisation. You could have a project for use with;

• Volunteer Recruitment
• Training
• Appraisals
• Administration
• Planning processes like fundraising, event management etc.

Apart from reporting projects will enable you to use templates and workflows, with reminders for the users.

Deciding your Project structure

One of the first things to do when configuring Charitylog will be to set up a list of Projects that can be used to categorise all the data about work done. Most of our customers set up one Project for each service that they deliver, but sometimes more than one. Since the list of Projects that you use is entirely up to you, you just need to consider these issues:

Using fewer Projects

In theory, you could keep everything under a single Project, and for a minority of customers this is the correct way to do things. For most customers, this won't give enough reporting detail. When you create reports, you'll probably want to look at Referrals that have been delivered by different parts of your organisation/business. If these Referrals all exist under one Project, it will be difficult to disentangle them at reporting time. If you want to report on separate parts of your organisation, you'll probably want to use separate Projects.

Using more Projects

So it usually makes sense to split up your system into several Projects, maybe one Project per service that you deliver. The question then is how far to split those services - for example, one service is funded by two different revenue streams; would it be appropriate to split that up into separate Projects, one for each revenue stream, so that we can see where the money is going?

It isn't possible to give a definite "yes" or "no" answer, but the issues to consider are;

1. Referrals are always associated with one, and only one, Project. A Referral can't "cross" from one Project to another halfway through. If you choose to have two Projects that cover different "arms" of a service, then when someone moves from one "arm" to the other, you would need to close the Referral to do with their involvement with the first "arm" and open another Referral to do with their involvement with the second "arm". In reality, this is probably going to be confusing for the user, and will lead to data entry errors. Don't make the users of your system do too much of this "Referral crossing" - it's unintuitive and usually doesn't work very well.
2. On the other hand, if this "Referral crossing" issue isn't likely to be a factor, it's very easy to combine Projects at reporting time. Using more Projects is unlikely to significantly complicate reporting, so don't worry too much about this issue.
3. If you want to categorise Referrals at another level apart from which Project they belong to, you can do this with Project Subcategories or Project Funding Streams.

Project Setup

The Project Set Up page displays the Projects that exist on your system.

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Features on this page

• the "Search Through Projects" field allows you to filter the display on the page. Type the text you want to filter by, and the page will automatically hide Projects that don't match that text.
• you can create new Projects with the "Enter New Project" buttons (this will open the Project Details page for the new Project)
• you can show inactive Projects with the "Show All (including inactive)" button
• clicking on the name of a Project will take you to the Project Details page for that Project

Editing Project Details

General tab

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Here you can give the project a name and description, link to a module (using the "Type of Project" field), etc. See the Project Details - General tab page for full details.

Record a Contact tab

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The Record a Contact tab allows you to choose how the Contact Management part of the Project will operate. See the Project Details - Record a Contact tab page for full details.

Code Settings tab

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Choose whether to use Classification Codes in this project, and whether to force users to enter them. See the Project Details - Code Settings tab page for full details.

Funding tab

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Record who funds this project, and the related amount(s). See the Project Details - Funding tab page for full details.

Types Of Orgs & People tab

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Choose which Organisation and People types this project works with. See the Project Details - Types Of Orgs & People tab for full details.

Additional Data Collection tab

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Select which Assessment Forms, Extension Databases and Ladder Outcomes to link to this project. See the Project Details - Additional Data Collection tab page for full details.

3rd Party Systems tab

Select options for links to third party software. See the Project Details - 3rd Party Systems tab for full details.

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