Cake with a clear conscience

Everybody needs cake, but some in York are short of everyday food. Joanne Casey explains how Information Services have managed to balance these two facts.

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On the last Friday of every month, staff from the Library, IT Services, and the Archives hold a Cake Day to raise money for charity. Any member of staff can nominate a cause to support, volunteers bake cakes, and equally selfless volunteers donate money to eat them. In the past, we've supported local, national, and international charities including Plan's Because I Am A Girl campaign, the Poppy Road Poppy Project, Macmillan, St Leonard's Hospice, and the Nepal Earthquake Appeal.

A fine selection of cake

This time, we're supporting the York Foodbank, run by the Trussell Trust, and in a bit of a twist, we've encouraged people to bring along donations of food rather than (or as well as!) cash. The Foodbank provide lists of the items that they currently need to stock up on to fill food parcels for families and individuals in crisis; at this time of year, they also ask people to donate items with Christmas in mind, so our collection boxes contain not just tinned food, tea, coffee, UHT milk, and cereals, but also biscuits, snacks, selection boxes, chocolate advent calendars - things that will make the festive season a little bit brighter for people who are struggling.

Sarah Peace, who suggested this month's charity explained why she chose this cause:

"I chose to nominate York Foodbank for our October cake day as it's a charity that we may all need to turn to at some point in our lives.

The food bank helps people struggling with insecure work, low pay and high living costs. Families and individuals are going hungry and skipping meals in our country to make ends meet. 

I hope that raising money and donating food in the run up to Christmas may make the difference to families in York."

One of our four collection boxes

The Trussell Trust report that in 2014/15, the food banks they operate gave out 1,084,064 emergency three-day parcels of food. They also work with food bank users, to listen to their concerns and point them to other sources of help: their developing More Than Food initiative partners with other advisory agencies to provide support with managing money, learning to cook and eat well, developing job skills, and making benefit claims.

There are many stories of people who have benefited from the intervention of a food bank when they're struggling:

"We resorted to borrowing a tin of soup from next door to feed our 18 month old daughter. The problems came when my partner got ill and received no sick pay. It was snowing and we were struggling to afford food and heating. In the end the cupboards were bare. I don't know what we would have done without the foodbank." 

We're collecting donations of non-perishable food until Tuesday 3 November, so if you'd like to join us, we'd be happy to have your donation - just drop it off at the Library or IT Services. The Foodbank have asked us to say that, while they're grateful for any and all gifts, they do have a lot of beans at the moment!

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Update

By the time our collection ended earlier this week, we'd collected vast quantities of food - so much that we had to use the department van to deliver it to York FoodBank. A plan to list how much food we'd collected fell by the wayside as we just didn't have enough space to get it all out of the boxes, but the collection included pasta and sauce, tinned meat, coffee, tea, sugar, soup, cereals, herbs and spices, tinned fruit and puddings, chocolate advent calendars and selection boxes, biscuits, UHT milk, and Christmas puddings and cake. In addition to that, we collected £121 in cash.

The full haul, loaded up and ready to be delivered.

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More information:

• York Foodbank
• York Foodbank shopping list
• The Trussell Trust - statistics
• The Trussell Trust - More than Food

What do you really think about IT?

Following on from Jackie Knowles’ post on the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) award last week, Sarah Peace reflects on what CSE has meant in practice for Information.

One of the things we've put into practice and value greatly since starting the process of achieving CSE is our customer feedback.

I've been in charge of the IT Support Office for five years and although we've always had ways our customers could provide feedback, including comment cards and the IT Survey, this is an area we've really enhanced upon. 

In March this year, we introduced a satisfaction sampling method from our enquiry handling system. This sends a satisfaction survey email to one in ten closed enquiries that we have dealt with. The survey asks two questions: Were you happy with how we handled your query? and How useful was the response you received? Users can choose to respond anonymously or leave the specific enquiry number.

We had been worried that surveying our customers like this might case survey fatigue, but a month after switching it on we wondered why hadn't done it years ago! Since March we've received over 300 replies, with 93% of respondents saying Yes, they were happy with how we handled the query, and 87% rating us four or five out of five on how useful the response was.

These results are fantastic and we’re currently beating our target of 90% which is in our Service Standards (I think we’ll need to increase this target soon!).

Here's some of the feedback we received:

“It was extremely complicated and other depts were passing me from pillar to post but you got it sorted out”

“It was handled quickly and efficiently and gave me all the options so I could choose which was the best way forward”

“Efficient and very helpful. Not a complicated process at all”

“Support team gave a fast and friendly series of responses and resolved the issue”

What do we do with this feedback? Any feedback which mentions a particular service is passed on to the service owner within the department. Any staff feedback is passed directly to the individual. One team has joked that they get so much positive feedback they may need to start a gold star chart in the office.

The difference between this feedback mechanism and others is that it’s about a specific issue and we can get back to the user on an individual basis. It also helps us to gain a greater understanding of what our customers expect.

This week we’re also running a “penny for your thoughts” campaign to sample the satisfaction level for our in person queries. Every walk-in customer is given a penny and asked to choose whether they are happy or not with the service they have received. This is a very quick and cheap way to sample satisfaction levels. This is what the box looked like on day two:

At the end of this month, we will also be running the IT Survey again for all staff and students. I would encourage you all to complete this, as we really do value your feedback and this helps to shape what IT Services will look like in the future. Please take time to look at what we’re doing with the results of the last survey we ran here.

And if you have any thoughts on how we gather feedback, we’d love to hear them.

Sarah Peace