Friday, 10 November 2006

Friday excursion

I enjoyed a long lie-in until nearly 8:00 am. I left shortly after 9:00 and first went to the Connexions offices in Hertford to hand-deliver our signed contract. I then drove to Hitchin for a meeting. North Herts CVS occupy first-floor offices in the most attractive street in Hitchin: opposite the Kings Head pub, and two minutes walk away from both Moore’s (one of the finest second-hand bookshops in the country) and the Sun Hotel (Folk Club of the year 2005).

The meeting, to discuss county-wide IT issues, is with my counterparts from North Herts CVS and the Broxbourne Voluntary Sector Development Agency. I don’t think anyone could dislike Jacquie from North Herts CVS. She is tall, intelligent, attractive, warm, and eccentric to just the right degree: sufficient to be unusually interesting, but not enough to arouse genuine fear. Ian from BVSDA is also instantly likeable. He has a great work ethic and delivers an astonishing amount on very low resources. If I learnt that one of my counterparts in Hertfordshire had fed 5,000 from with a white sliced load and a few fish fingers, I’d put my money on Ian. Also present was Karen, who works with Ian and is the acknowledged expert on “Volbase”. I’ve only met Karen once or twice before and warmed to her greatly when she announced she had bought her own lunch in the form of Marmalade sandwiches.

Volbase is a contact management system specially designed for infrastructure organisations like CVSs and we are trying to introduce Volbase as a common system for all Herts CVSs. Unfortunately, serious problems are arising over the differing capacities of CVSs to implement the system. Sadly, Watford CVS has so far done nothing to implement the system. It is a good system, but I have spent my first few months at WCVS rebuilding the network and introducing proper shared resources. We already run Microsoft Outlook and V-base for our volunteering centre, and introducing a third contact management system seemed A Bridge Too Far for my over-stretched staff.

It seems to me that I can only justify implementation if Volbase will also feed data into the Herts CVS website, and if we also use it as the foundation for quality assurance systems for recording all contacts we have with our members.

Informed by Karen’s knowledge, Ian and Jacquie and I talked through options and agreed that Volbase would be central to a new IT strategy for all Herts CVSs, but with individual CVSs having options to proceed at different paces. This seemed most satisfactory, but will mean that I now need to introduce a new system to my staff, and reconcile this to our use of V-base and Microsoft Outlook.

Secondly, we looked at the need to develop a common IT infrastructure to share information and services more effectively. Thirdly we looked at options for providing IT support to voluntary groups in the County. Other counties have in place co-ordinated arrangements to provide IT support. For example, Cambridgeshire has a “circuit riders” project of mobile IT workers and Essex is implementing a common web infrastructure so all CVSs and voluntary groups can communicate effectively and share information on line. Hertfordshire is lagging dangerously behind.

But by now, Ian was fast running out of time to collect his car from a car park, and Jacquie and I had to leave for a further meeting.

In the sticks

Jacquie agreed that I should act as chauffer, so I drove us both to a place called Little Chesterton. I believe Little Chesterton is in Cambridgeshire, but it could just as easily be in Hertfordshire. Or Essex. I’ve also a suspicion that it may really be in Suffolk.

Anyway, we went there to meet with representatives from ChangeUp East and SAVO, the Suffolk Association of Voluntary Organisations. Watford CVS, North Herts CVS and SAVO are the chief partners in Trustees Together, a regional project to support charity trustees in the East of England, funded by ChangeUp East.

Apart from Jacquie and me, there were only three others present: Jan from ChangeUp East, and Jonathon and Ionne from SAVO. Apparently I chaired the meeting, but it was hard to tell. We talked through work undertaken in the past year or so, how to collaborate on future work, how to engage other regional partners in the Trustees Together initiative. Pride of place went to two SAVO initiatives: e-learning for trustees and a recent tender to the Governance Hub to develop learning materials for the Chairs of trustee bodies. Although this latter is a Trustees Together partnership initiative, it is really SAVO who have done all the work and developed a very impressive bid branded as In The Hot Seat. The Governance Hub is likely to take a decision in the next few weeks.

Friday Night

After returning Jacquie to Hitchin, I made it home to WGC (Welwyn Garden City) a bit before 6:00 pm. Jackie was already home and we soon opened a Friday night bottle of red wine. Jackie’s son Bryan returned from work with some friends, my son Bobby phoned from Brighton, Jackie’s daughter Rhiannon called from a few streets away, my daughter Nancy called from Essex, and then Jackie’s dad Ed called from the other side of town. Jackie and I talked and chatted and opened a second bottle of wine.

By 8:00, after a cursory attempt at tuning our guitars, we had tried and failed to play several songs from our youth: T Rex, Status Quo, Kirsty MacColl, and Steve Harley. Heaven knows what Bryan and his friends thought of it all. After jamming inconsequentially for a few more minutes, we silently agreed that this probably was not the night we would miraculously compose a masterpiece together. Instead, Jackie produced a marvellous curry. God I love this woman.

After eating, we watched QI on BBC2, and then on BBC4 watched next week’s Children In Need QI special. Toward the end, host Stephen Fry asked: What percentage of your Children In Need donations is spent on administration? and comedian Alan Davies replied None. It’s a complete shambles. How we laughed.