London Nightline are a charity providing a confidential listening, emotional support and practical information service to London’s students. London Nightline began in 1971 where it was modelled around the Samaritan’s with the key difference that all volunteers are students and the service is tailored to students needs. Nightline was set up as a response to a spate of student suicides at Imperial. Originally based in South Kensington and known as West London Nightline the charity then spread to address the needs of students across the city.
You can visit their website here: http://nightline.org.uk/
The aim of my time at Nightline is to interview volunteers and service users about their experiences. These responses will be used to create a report of recommendations to improve how the charity handles various aspects of how it runs from volunteer training through to the policies and procedures which are used to govern the way we take calls. In addition, I will use people’s responses to create some publicity to help recruit next year’s cohort of volunteers.
My first week has involved putting in the groundwork by designing the interview questions, contacting volunteers and service users to arrange interviews and drafting the report structure. Also, I have looked at existing feedback from the volunteer end of year survey and caller feedback form. The aim of my interviews is to expand on areas for improvement shown in these existing forms of feedback. The process of looking through existing feedback has also highlighted the need to improve the way the charity collects feedback. To address this, I’ve designed a new feedback form for the website which will automatically collect feedback into coherent and useful data.
Next week I’m going to start interviewing volunteers and from then the project should be in full swing!