Case Study: Stable Life
As a retiring biological data analyst, Alistair MacDougall, sought opportunities to volunteer in data-related roles for charities. He collaborated with Stable Life, a charity associated with a commercial riding stables, to configure a system that complied with GDPR regulations. Despite staffing challenges, he successfully prepared Stable Life to implement the new system.
View the transcript below:
Alistair MacDougall:
Well, in the summer of 2020, when I had nine months left before retiring as a biological data analyst, I started looking to see what opportunities there were to volunteer helping charities with their data. I put data and charity into Google and came across the Scottish tech army. And for me, it is the perfect organisation to volunteer with. It strengthens my links to Scotland. I'm in Norwich. I really like what the STA is doing to support those starting out in the tech area. And I'm very pleased to see the emphasis on influencing national policy on Tech for Good.
I've helped on three projects, and I'm just starting out on a fourth. My first project was helping a charity understand how to solve a problem they had updating their client data in the open source customer relationship management software civvy CRM. Apart from the MySQL database that held the data, everything else was new to me, the content management system Drupal, PHP is a language, and civvy CRM itself. To understand what was going on, I set up my own web server to run Drupal and civvy CRM, I decided to concentrate on projects dealing with customer data.
Each charity has different needs and the range of solutions offered to manage customer data can be pretty bewildering. I did the Stable Life work together with Debbie Skier who provided good sense and familiarity with GDPR. So it was great to have her help.
Stable Life is a charity that is an offshoot of a commercial riding stables. So you have two businesses being run together. The commercial stables looks after horses and teaches people how to ride. The charity helps young people who've lost their way a bit by teaching them how to look after and work with horses. So there are staff to shedule and lessons to arrange horses to manage and bills to pay and volunteers to organise. All in a farm setting where no one really wants to sit in an office with a computer.
It was quite a challenge for Stable Life to work out how to tackle this. Before we joined them, they had decided they wanted to use a software set up by a web design company, where the owners of the company also run a commercial stables. So it was written by people who know what is involved.
Stable Life had two main needs help. The first was simply encouragement and help to learn the software. And to understand how to break down the implementation into manageable pieces. We spent time talking things through preparing workflows with screenshots of the software, and producing a video tutorial on how to use the phone app that came with the software, that helped them to identify where to start on the implementation, identifying the things where staff would really see a benefit as soon as they started to use the new system.
Working on Zoom was great for discussions and talking things through. But we missed the opportunity to visit the stables and help move things forwards. We also alerted Stable Life to issues we came across with the software, which helped them to avoid getting stuck because of inconsistencies in the web interface.
The second issue was how to configure the system to keep the commercial data records separate from the charity data to comply with GDPR. Together with stable life, we worked out that it would be best not to put any of the charity client personal information such as name, age and address into the new system. But to create anonymous charity riders for booking into activities and lessons.
The biggest difficulty for stable life was having staff in key positions leave just as they were getting ready to introduce a new system. This has delayed things a lot. But it's better for them to wait until the staffing is settled before making big changes. What started out as a project that was expected to take two months continued for six months. And at that point, we had done all the preparation work we could helping Stable Life to get ready to use the system. But there were still delays in appointing staff. So we agreed with Stable Life to end the current project. Knowing that we'd help them successfully to complete all their preparatory work. If they get stuck later on, they can always ask us back to give a bit more help.
I really like the community spirit and the appreciation I get from STA colleagues for the work I'm doing. And volunteering with the STA means that I can continue to put my computing and data skills to good use, even after retiring.
I also enjoy learning new things. So for instance, I have only ever been a user of databases and I've never built one of my own. The projects I'm on are giving me the opportunity to learn to do that. Overall, I would like to say a big thank you to the people who run the STA for the opportunity to volunteer.
