Brighton and Hove
Business Community Partnership (BCP)

Industry: Not for profit sector
Services: eLink Advantage

“eLink Advantage is starting to transform the way we are working as a team. Joint projects are more easily shared and updated, and as we understand the extent of the possibilities, interesting new approaches to managing our workload are becoming clear. The fact that they system can be accessed away from the office also enables a small organisation like ours to facilitate home and flexible working practices in a way that would not have been possible previously, this will help us remain compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act.”

About the Company

BCP is a not-for-profit company that exists to broker relationships between businesses, the voluntary and community sector and statutory sector organisations. Through the programmes we run, businesses are able to maximise the benefits of their Corporate Social Responsibility in terms of recruitment and retention of staff, improved local and national reputation, access to new customer bases and opportunities for innovative and creative thinking. The community benefits are similarly maximised through our extensive network of community contacts, our awareness of the sector and its needs and our focus on promoting and supporting long-term, sustainable partnerships which benefit all parties.

Challenges:

• To develop a membership database which enables us to link the needs of our members in the voluntary and community sector to available support from businesses and statutory sector organisations.

• To track approaches to business to ensure promises are kept, relationships remain active and everyone in the office has shared information on progress with any one company

• To link numerous staff to meetings and shared activities and make papers available on line

• Our old contact database was difficult to manage and disorganised

• Email In box was full and unwieldy

• To manage projects and report on progress effectively

Solutions

• Database designed by e-advantage solutions which enables all the key activity of different partners to be registered, and which helps us more effectively link needs to potential sources of support. We can sort our members in many different ways, which enables us to draw down useful information at the push of a button

• New ‘business recruitment’ project set up with links to key contacts, company, relevant staff member, actions and documents which enables us to see at a glance what is outstanding and where progress is being made

• Fantastic result with this system – also great for passing on actions, inviting people to meetings and knowing where people are, both geographically and in terms of work load/actions

• With eLink Advantage we have a database we trust, duplications are easy to find and eliminate, different contacts can be linked to multiple projects, documents, actions and agenda dates. Where it was difficult to find contacts you didn’t know well before, eLink Advantage can now locate them with a bit of remembered name!

• Although it took some time to start trusting the system, emails can now be turned into actions, documents or agenda items and can be deleted from the in box which frees space and makes all the interfaces smoother. The only caution is that you remember to get on with some of your actions rather than just linking them to the rest of your life!

"The team are all now gaining confidence and we are really starting to see the more profound benefits of this system in gathering, linking, storing and sharing information. Every time I call e-Advantage with an idle query as to whether or not something I need to do can be done, the answer is invariably ‘Easily’, and it is.

The system has taken a while to lose its mystique and become a familiar friend, but the whole process has been fantastically supported by e-Advantage Solutions who have listened, advised and given prompt assistance whenever it has been needed. The whole package has increased its value dramatically as a result of the readily available advice e-Advantage offer on applying the system most effectively to our specific needs. The team all agree that eLink Advantage is now offering us all the advantages we hoped it would and we would be hard pressed to manage without it."