Booking Management
The delivery of your customers' bookings is vital to the success of your organisation. Our experience in growing annual booking revenues to in excess of £240,000 is owed to our understanding of customers' needs and the delivery of great service.
We have also been able to increase the level of bookings by offering a more complete service to hirers, making bookings with us less stressful. This is done through out booking packages and add-on services.
Within our team we have a dedicated staff member working 9am - 9pm weekdays and 9am - 4pm weekends, responding to enquiries via phone, email or social media within an hour of their enqury. This allows us to secure far more bookings than most venues are.
Marketing
Marketing your centre is vital to its success, noth in generating useage and revenue as well as ensuring the good work you do in providing services to your community reaches as many people as possible.
Marketing needs to look professional, be eye catching and up to date, this can be a tough job without the skilled people and time to do it. As part of our service, our experienced team of marketing professionals will advertise your venue through a website, social media and professionally printed material
Community Engagement
We operate within a social enterprise business model, in which trading operations such as events and catering support the delivery of our community work. We have an excellent track record in obtaining grants from a range of funders, from small trusts to national organisations to fund its work.
As a charity we have identified five key areas of work in which we are able to support the community in developing stronger more resilient ties. For each of these areas the team have develolped different projects and services to respond to the needs of the community in each of our locations.
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To find out more about our five areas of work please check our "About Us" page.
Health and Safety
As a trustee/committee member, you are responsible for ensuring the venue you hire to the public is safe and compliant. In this age of complex health and safety requirements and litigation, it is vital that facilities open to the public understand and comply with the requirements on time and risk assess thoroughly.
These checks and the proof of these are your defense in court, should anything go wrong. Without carrying this out yourselves or having another competent do this for you, you are open to criminal liability should the worst happen.
As part of our service, we have a highly trained NEBOSH safety consultant who will carry out a safety audit alongside a dedicated member of staff for our Head of Facilities and Safety.
Safeguarding
Safeguarding is a large and complex area based on one fundamental value that we all have the responsibility to protect others less able to protect themselves from harm. It is the duty of any organisation to ensure it protects the children and vulnerable people it works with from harm and has the policy and procedure in place to identify those risks and support/protect them.
Beyond your legal requirements in safeguarding your users, is a much more important moral obligation, as the managers of a community facility that people in your community see as a place of safety and that they trust, that you must be living up to high expectations and work as a beacon of safety in the community.
WFCA takes its safeguarding responsibilities with the utmost seriousness with a detailed safeguarding policy which is under continuous review, which underpins our induction, annual and ongoing training of all our staff and volunteers at all sites. Within our team we have specialist practitioners able to support children and identify risks as well as a Duty DSL team providing trained 24/7 cover to all staff, volunteers and hirers assistance assistance to ensure all concerns are recorded, assessed and where needed, reported.
Within all our service contracts our safeguarding policy, practise and DSL Team is a required element, so we can ensure all young/vulnerable are protected from harm after using any facility we manage.
Employment
Employing staff can be time consuming and costly, with many costs beyond the hourly rate of the staff member adding up. Operating with a small staff team can also cause stress for the committee with holiday cover and sickness.
Many small hall and community centre struggle with arranging staff cover for holiday and can be plunged into chaos when a key (on the only) member of staff is sick or resigns. This can have a huge impact on your ability to operate. Our service means our facility will not rely on a single member of staff or volunteer, but a team of 25+ staff supported by your volunteers.
With a large team there are clear benefits of consistency of cover but also in terms of efficiency with staff focused on specialist areas giving a more professional and consistent service.
With our services the cost of staff support, pay roll admin, HR Advice, HR Admin, sick pay, holiday cover and also staff training/development and supervision is taken care of for you.
Investing Back In The Community
Within our operations management model WFCA will setup activities to run at your centre which will in themselves provide a service to benefit members of the community, but also generate income which we will use to open new services to support the community.
For examples we will run coffee mornings and low cost lunch club during the week providing social opportunities for members of the community. With revenues raised from the se activities we will then reinvest into the community with new services such as community support worker drop-ins, support groups, social clubs and free fundays.
Beyond these activities, WFCAs team will seek to secure additional funding to set up and run new activities for the community, from fundays to youth clubs and from training for those out of of work to free fitness classes.