Recently I've been lucky enough to be working with Age UK Kensington & Chelsea, helping them make the move to a new database/CRM system. Part of this has work has involved extracting the information from their outgoing system, which has given me the chance to do a bit of analysis. This heat map shows two years, or thereabouts, of referrals to their Dementia services (advice, 1-to-1 support, befriending, groups and more). Maps and heat maps are fabulous. They certainly take a

Jargon is everywhere and it generally does us no favours. The IT world is particularly bad for this. There are TLAs everywhere! (Three Letter Acronyms) There is often confusion between "CRM" and "CMS", especially within frontline charities. Frontline charities are those that deliver services to people, and therefore the work they really want to do is being out there, serving their communities, rather than operating a computer. Databases are a necessary evil for charities like

The voluntary sector is going increasingly cloud-based. 10 years ago it was a given that if you had a database, it was run locally (on a server in a cupboard, most likely) and office applications etc were run on the user's own machine. Today the vast majority of databases live in the cloud and are accessed by a web browser, and there are real options (like Google Docs) for taking your day-to-day documents into the cloud as well. I still use M$ Office for in-depth or detailed