National Blind Childrens Society

Background

NBCS is a national charity providing help and support to visually impaired and blind children and their families.  It has its head office in Highbridge, Somerset, and has in the last few years opened up and expanded a new regional office in Birmingham.

Communications, both internal and external, are very important to the charity as they have a large and growing number of young people who rely upon them for advice and practical help on a daily basis.  In addition, the growing list of supporters working across the country to raise funds from private individuals as well as from companies, through payroll giving schemes and fundraising events, are vital to NBCS in generating the funds required to meet the ever-increasing demands on their resources.

Brief

ICS&M has been looking after the IT requirements of NBCS since the early 1990s and has supported the charity in ensuring its systems have been capable of meeting its
ever-increasing needs as it has grown from a small regional charity into the national organisation it is today.

ICS&M’s work has been concentrated on providing the hardware and systems which have allowed the growing number of staff to handle, store and use the volume of information required to run the organisation cost-effectively.  A series of Small Business Servers has been installed with increasing capacity over the period until 2005.

Lucy Manchip, IT Manager at NBCS until recently, explained, “Three years ago I was new to the charity and still training. ICS&M have helped me learn much of what I know today about computer systems and have been very supportive by working with us to identify when, and how, we have needed to upgrade and expand our systems to meet the extra pressures we face as we are asked to help more and more children to avoid becoming disadvantaged as a consequence of their disabilities”.

Solution

Lucy explained, “In 2005 it became apparent that we needed new network servers to handle the growing workload.  ICS&M’s solution was to harness the two existing SBS servers whilst adding 2 new main network servers, thereby avoiding the need to invest in totally new equipment and giving us an expandable server network for the future.  The two older servers handle our email communications and customised books, which we publish in-house for various types of visually impaired children, whilst the new servers handle our SQL database and electronic storage needs”.

The most recent development has been the need to improve communications with, and access to head office information from, the Birmingham office which now has around 10 staff.  The solution has been the installation of a Terminal Server which allows much faster telephone dialling in to our Highbridge computer system using a 2Mb broadband link.

Client comment

Lucy speaks highly of the team at ICS&M saying, “Dave Cowen and his team have been very supportive and has recognised the implications of our charity status by regularly looking at how we can keep our capital outlay to a minimum as we frequently need to fundraise specifically to pay for new IT.  I think it is a mark of the working relationship that we have built up over the last 4 years, in particular, that at NBCS we no longer have need of an IT Manager which has allowed me to move into frontline delivery handling Services for Children whilst having a watching brief on IT.  We do have an IT technician who handles day-to-day needs around the offices, but we rely totally on ICS&M to provide our systems requirements, advise on upgrades as required and provide a fast and efficient onsite maintenance and repair service”. 

She added, “ICS&M has always impressed us with its sensitive approach to our needs and has been totally reliable.  We get the quality of expertise and advice you would expect from a much larger, national IT company delivered locally by a company who always put our interests first.  We have never even once considered changing supplier”.