IT goes rural: The North Yorkshire Forum for Voluntary Organisations

North Yorkshire Forum for Voluntary Organisations (NYFVO) is an umbrella organisation for voluntary groups. There are two full-time and six part-time staff and they have an annual income of £140,000. When Neil Irving joined he saw an ideal opportunity for using IT to help communication between isolated voluntary groups in a rural area. With a grant from the local authority and health authority, email was installed in 13 local Councils for Voluntary Services.

Training for all staff was integral. 'You have to make sure that software becomes part of existing administrative routines,' Neil argues. 'Often the kit is installed and it ends up unused or just sitting on the director's desk. Ideally checking email should be as second nature as checking the post.' Funding for extending the network to a further 20 organisations was secured from the National Lottery Charities Board.

When vital rural community groups were threatened by proposed local authority funding cuts of £2 million, the email network allowed a responsive campaign and lobbying network to develop. Neil feels that the electronic medium was crucial. 'There's no way we could have circulated that amount of information without email. We just don't have the staff resources. We put out 26 briefings in a three-month period. At one point we were sending out three mailings a week.'

'As soon as committee papers were ready we could circulate them online. Sometimes people in the network were better informed than the councillors who were waiting for their briefings to arrive in the post.'

As a result of the campaign, no cuts were made to voluntary sector services, although some social services were cut. The email network is still fulfilling a vital function in keeping people up to date and allowing organisations to share information.