Industry: Registered charity
Location: Norwich
ABOUT
The Norfolk Deaf Association (NDA) provides high-quality information, support, awareness and communication services to young people and adults with all degrees of hearing loss in Norfolk.
Services, including hearing aid maintenance, advice on assistive listening technology and communication methods, befriending, support with tinnitus and other related conditions are all delivered by a team of dedicated staff and volunteers. Support is delivered through fixed location community clinics, mobile clinics and home visits – the NDA endeavours to reach as many people with hearing loss as possible, including those in nursing homes and sheltered complexes.
The NDA exists for the purpose of improving the life of people with hearing loss and they consistently reach out and support individuals – despite an upwards trend of service users (57% since 2015, with numbers still rising).
CLIENT STORY
We worked with Norfolk Deaf Association to migrate their IT systems to the cloud. Read all about it below.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to staff at Breakwater IT for their professionalism, technical acumen, understanding and patience whilst developing the system to meet our specific requirements, and then testing and implementing it. Our working practices, security of data and reliability have improved considerably as a result of the new system, thank you.
Challenge
With a growing number of service users, the NDA found itself with an increasingly large record of individuals requiring assistance.
It was a priority to ensure the appropriate professional resources were in place to underpin the high level of support the NDA provides.
Continued fund-raising, triggered by a resolve to offer services to all those requiring them across Norfolk, provided the opportunity to review the administrative tools that facilitated the NDA’s support process. It was decided that investment was required to create a well-organised database that would assist the volunteers, employees and ultimately service users across the NDA.
The existing NDA database ranged across a multitude of different spreadsheets, each accessed and maintained by separate personnel. With a commitment to delivering the most efficient service to its users, the NDA recognised it required a new, unified database that all employees would be able to utilise in the same way.
Solution
Subscription to the online Office 365 subscription provided the NDA with access to the collaborative and organisational capabilities of SharePoint.
Breakwater’s SharePoint Developer advised the NDA on the best ways of employing SharePoint to create a new database for their service users. The NDA’s data requirements and current processes were discussed to enable the design of a system that would work seamlessly with existing applications.
A new database was proposed to the NDA, including features that would enable the simple and customisable capture of information; including history, proposed support and any accompanying notes. Database users would no longer have to integrate edits or interpret unique ways of recording information as SharePoint is cohesive and encourages the creation of single files which a specified number of users can contribute to.
Forming part of the Office 365 suite, SharePoint is hosted in the cloud and is inherently collaborative – an ideal solution for drawing different data locations into a central file. The cloud ensures SharePoint is naturally secure, meaning the NDA can store, organise and share information with confidence that it is backed up and recoverable.
In addition to a central database, a new reporting engine was delivered – again harnessing the simple sharing and reporting tools that can be found within SharePoint. The new reporting function provided the NDA with such statistics as the total service users, the number of new referrals, the number of service users seen in a particular period, clinic type and location; enabling easy review of data and processes to allow the most effectual service.
Result
The NDA now have a new database in which they can store service user details, hosted within the SharePoint platform.
Authorised personnel can easily add or edit information within the database – helping each other to monitor the service they provide and encouraging an efficient process.
The database and accompanying reporting system can be easily reviewed or edited from almost any device or location, and as the files are hosted in the cloud they are both cost-effective and secure.
With the right technical groundwork in place, the NDA can now introduce Add-Ins to extend the capabilities of their SharePoint files. The new database is custom-made for the NDA and as a result reflects their requirements exactly, delivering real results to help with the productivity of their service.
