FiSH Neighbourhood Care

About FiSH Neighbourhood Care

FiSH Neighbourhood Care provides voluntary help for the residents of Barnes, Mortlake & East Sheen in South-West London with the aim of combating loneliness and providing practical support.

FiSH was established in 1962 as one of the first neighbourhood care organisations in the country.

Today FiSH has over 500 clients and 300 volunteers and provides assistance and support to anyone in the local area. They run a helpline, befriending service, bus transportation service, Choir and a wide array of local events.

• To have a single database to organize and record activities as the previous database (an Access database) was discontinued, and managing multiple databases was proving time consuming and unwieldy
• To develop a solution whereby extending functionality was easy to do

• Managing a single CRM saves FiSH a significant amount of time and makes organising their activities easier
• As the number of volunteers, jobs and partnerships have grown it has been much easier to scale up operations (see Covid-19 response below)
• Dashboards allow ability to oversee current status across a wide range of activities and have been customised with Covid-19 to focus on the status of emergency activities etc. the current situation has spurred.
• Can now extend functionality relatively easily e.g. new mail merge tools without so many obstacles as before

Adapting to Covid-19

FiSH has had to adapt to a very different situation and upscale – practically overnight – to meet demand, all of which Salesforce is built for:

• 100+ new volunteers have come forward who have been allocated to the helpline, telephone befriending and regular shopping for clients in lockdown
• Shopping: Potential volunteer calls helpline or inputs data through the web Volunteer Application Form, then is registered on Salesforce as a Contact and Volunteer so that they can be matched with a vulnerable client who cannot leave their home during lockdown but needs food and supplies
• Telephone Buddies: Having to isolate in lockdown can be extremely lonely, so a potential volunteer can apply to be a ‘Telephone Buddy’ and have a friendly chat
• FiSH staff can easily work from home, all via the Salesforce platform
• Transport - instead of picking up clients from home in buses to take them shopping, outings, choir, play bridge, art classes etc. now are delivering meals to clients at home, a totally different process which can still be recorded on Salesforce
• Meals are donated by local retailers and these donations can be recorded on Salesforce
• The Helpline has gone from c.30 jobs allocated per week to 532 in June
• 80+ new telephone befriending partnerships have been established in the last month