Charity Insights

After a brief hiatus, I am back to complete the final half of my project at London Nightline! Right now, big changes are happening at Nightline as the charity moves from its long-term home at the University of London Union to a new location in Central London. In the meantime, I find myself at Nightline’s temporary office nestled in some KCL student halls. This means a new commute to South London and new challenges such as ‘How do you ride a bike with no wheels?’, which is how I’ve found it after a short stay in the new neighbourhood.

 

Transportation challenges aside my project is progressing well, with the trials & tribulations of organising volunteer interviews and collating feedback data all but complete I find myself freshly adept at conducting interviews and creating both spreadsheets and surveys. I now turn my focus to report writing where I have begun to identify key areas where Nightline is working effectively and others where there’s room for improvement as a service. My aim now is to convey this information concisely and effectively within my report and make sure the relevant people within the charity can put improvements into action.

 

My time at Nightline so far has given me some great experience of volunteer engagement and project organisation. I have been lucky to work with Grace, the very helpful and knowledgeable new coordinator of London Nightline who has been on hand to offer her advice and views about the important aspects of the project. Over the next couple of weeks, I look forward to bringing my report to fruition and then over the next year seeing how this the findings of this research can be used to improve the way we work as service.

Read ‘How do you ride a bike with no wheels?’ – My time at London Nightline in full

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!

Read Spending my daytimes at London Nightline in full