Opening up the direct lines

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Kathryn Rawe takes a look at the distributors’ joint phone line and website on the anniversary of their launch

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It is one year since the five main Lottery distributors launched the joint good causes helpline and website, in response to persistent demands from, among others, the Culture Secretary, that they simplify access to information about Lottery awards. The scheme, administered by NOF, is halfway through a two-year trial. The telephone and textphone helpline had a very slow start, with numbers of calls running at less than 250 a month for the first three months, then rising steadily to a peak of 708 in October. That was the month in which Camelot set up a three-month trial of an automatic ‘mid-call divert’ from its own telephone hotline, to re-route people who ring the Lottery operator assuming that it also gives out grant funding. The call divert has since become a permanent feature.

Helpline calls dropped back in December, but jumped to more than 1,100 in January, an increase that Sally Haythornthwaite, who helped coordinate the scheme and is deputy of communications at NOF, attributes to Golden Jubilee publicity at the start of the year. The helpline operates out of a call cen-tre in Preston, with three dedicated staff. It costs £5,000 a month to run, so if a rate of 1,000 calls a month is maintained, the service is costing £5 per call. The joint internet portal, also launched a year ago, has recorded between 1,200 and 2,300 hits a month, with high points in June, August, September and November and lows in April, May and October. Numbers for December and January averaged 2,500. These figures are likely to be an under-representation, however, as the tracking system only records ‘IP addresses’ rather than individual visitors. For example, if 10 people accessed the site from a library computer, it would only register as one hit. 

Joint portal vistors

Lottery helpline calls

According to Haythornthwaite, the trial has been going well and there has been good feedback on the level of information being provided. She says: ‘The idea was that it would be something that people who hadn’t previously contacted a distributor could use and 79% of the calls are from new callers. The smaller grants such as Awards For All and the Community Fund, those at the grassroots level, have been the most popular so far.’ Daisy Powell, information officer at Awards For All, says that 32% of all calls to the joint helpline are diverted to A4A. ‘It is useful for applicants who are of a less formalised structure,’ she says. ‘Larger organisations, who are looking for big sums of money, already have an infrastructure and know where to get money from. Smaller, less organised groups don’t know where to start so the hotline can feed a lot of them through to us.’ When the helpline was launched, the question of how vigorously to promote it was a delicate issue for the distributors, who were anxious not to stimulate a level of demand and expectations that they could not hope to meet. One year on, that fear seems to have subsided. According to Powell, A4A is planning to market the joint helpline. Haythornthwaite says that over the next few years NOF and Camelot will be working together on a marketing push aimed at libraries, GP surgeries, Citizens Advice Bureaux and other public information points, to raise the profile of the portal and helpline. She says: ‘We will be working on a number of joint events this year, like the Jubilee, so the service should become more and more useful.’ The original impetus for setting up the joint helpline came from a report in 2000 by the Culture department’s quality assurance team QUEST. Tim Suter, its chief executive, says: ‘The thing the distributors were all worried about at the time was that they’d either get no calls or else be deluged by them. It sounds as though we’ve arrived at what seems like a respectable steady state.’ While the helpline and website are not to be reviewed until next year, changes are already taking place. The website is being developed to include a search facility and a series of case studies; and a joint public information leaflet about Lottery grants is being re-vamped to include details of the joint helpline. 

Joint Lottery helpline: 0845 275 0000 Monday to Friday 9am to 5.30pm Joint Lottery textphone: 0845 275 0022 Lottery internet portal: www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk