Cornwall’s Coastline Housing is using a dedicated training and development from Idox Group, based on the software provider’s own Open 4 Training & Development portal which was originally developed by Idox for its HR managers to find extra funding for training and learning activities. Coastline’s Idox portal went live in May 2014 after around five months implementation time.
While Coastline’s users merely need to type in their profile and requirements for an immediate list of education, training and employment results, behind the scenes a team of 35 researchers constantly scour the country for information published in news feeds, websites, documents and policy releases, and are tracking on a weekly basis over 2,000 information sources as well as thousands of overnight website updates.
The information is entered into Idox’s content management system, created specifically to cater to funding and other dynamic content. The Inspiring Futures portal is flushed and re-published every night to ensure all the changes to new schemes, updates to existing schemes and news items are communicated to users as quickly as possible.
The portal gives Coastline’s tenants access to a service that could direct them straight to funding, bursaries, scholarships and employment, many of which they may not have considered or even been aware of. For example, few people would think of applying to the ‘Devon and Cornwall Aid for Girls’ fund, but for females aged 16-23, there are discretionary grants available for pretty much any kind of training or support. As well as this type of county-specific fund, the portal searches nationally for more general sources allowing each user to pinpoint the most relevant results.
Having created the portal, Coastline faced two additional hurdles; Cornwall’s population is both poorer than the national average, and older. Many of its tenants have neither access to the internet nor any knowledge of how to use it. For these people, Coastline visited them in their homes with tablets and other mobile devices tethered to mobile phones for internet access. Once the information has been entered, Coastline staff print the personalised results there and then, enabling the tenants to apply for the relevant funding.
Since the successful implementation at Coastline, other housing associations have shown an interest in the portal, and because the costs of the portal are based on the number of houses under management, smaller housing providers are not debarred by set-up costs and on-going fees.
Leanna Cox, neighbourhood and involvement facilitator, Coastline Housing, said, “The Inspiring Futures portal enables us to supplement our training programmes by giving tenants new funding sources to meet their learning needs. They now have access to the online funding platform, giving each of them thousands of funding opportunities to cover their training and learning in order to help them get back to work.”
