Post Student ICT Project Sustainability

Voscur provide support for the University of the West of England's Student Consultancy Project delivered every year as part of the final year modules. Students must perform real work in the community of benefit to a working organisation, up to 15 of whom are chosen from applications every year. Once the Student group have gone the aided organisation should be able to sustain the project on their own.

Voscur are typically approached as below:

Dear Sean 

You visited the UWE approximately two weeks ago and spoke to students, 
currently working on a Consultancy Project, advising on what we should and
should not be giving to the clients in order for them to manage it better
after we hand over the product, for my team, a website.

I am currently looking for some website support after we have completed the
project on 19th March 2010? 

I have been looking around the Voscur website and see much about training
and I note you have a forum, but I'm not actually sure if this is what 
our client  need. 

Is it possible for you to advise me or point me in the right direction as
to maybe a voluntary group that helps charities with website problems.

Many thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind regards

A typical ( and hopefully helpful) response would be

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for contacting me, hopefully I can be of some help. As far as 
"looking for some website support" you would probably need to be a bit more 
specific about what it is you require as this could cover a whole host of 
activities, and state whether you're looking for free support or have a 
budget to pay for support. 

I'm going to assume that the "I" you're referring is actually your client, 
and will further assume that you want to give your client some options for 
seeking advice and help with maintaining the project your team has implemented.

You didn't say if you had looked at the Voscur ICT Directory. Voscur keep 
a list of local ICT support suppliers who have been recommended by our 
members as being Voluntary sector friendly or just very professional and 
good value, quite a few of them are web companies or can help with websites. 
You can find the Directory here - 
http://www.voscur.org/civicrm/profile?reset=1&gid=5 . 

The ICT Hub has a legacy Suppliers Directory as well - 
http://www.suppliersdirectory.org.uk/ which lists national companies 
that have  been recommended by Voluntary Sector clients.

As far as free support is concerned you have a number of options, most of 
which were outlined in the seminar. As you have seen you can ask questions 
on the Voscur ICT Forums, there are also several other mailing lists where 
you can access expertise - Brix (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/brix/ )  , 
UK Riders ( http://lists.lasa.org.uk/lists/info/ukriders ),  and local new 
media list Underscore  ( http://www.under-score.org.uk/ ). 

You can access volunteers through Volunteering Bristol 
( http://www.bristolvolunteers.org.uk/ ) and IT4Communities 
( http://www.it4communities.org.uk/ ) and depending on how the website was 
implemented you should be able to find a community of users around the 
software that can give peer support.

Hope that's some help and what you were looking for. If you have any more 
questions or need clarification, please go ahead and ask, also with your 
permission I would like to move this discussion to the Voscur Forums for 
others to reference ( I can anonymize your contribution if you wish).

To which the answer was obviously yes :)