Safeline

Neil Henderson, CEO of Safeline, writes:

"Sexual abuse has devastating and long-lasting impact on the victims/survivors, their families, communities, and society. It's the root cause of so many issues.

A high proportion of people in contact with mental-health services have experienced sexual abuse. People who are sexually abused as children are six times more likely than others to try to kill themselves as adults. 50% of child sexual abuse victims experience domestic violence in later life and 46% of youth homelessness is caused by children running away from home who have been sexually abused.

A lot of people still find it very difficult to talk about and on average it takes 15 years for a woman to seek support and 25 years for a man."

What size is Safeline?

In less than a decade we have grown from supporting 300 to 27,000 people. We have 52 FTE employees plus 50 volunteers. Our income was £1.8m in 2023-24.

When did Safeline start using Charitylog?

We started using it for one service in 2022, and have since expanded it across our organisation.

Was it easy to get started?

Implementing the new system was stress-free. The people at Charitylog were brilliant; the way they introduced the service to us, no hard-sell, they just explained clearly what it is and how it works.

The amount of time they invested in briefing and training us was incredible. They opened our eyes to all the different kinds of data we could capture and how we could use it to improve our charity. We implemented it 6 weeks ahead of schedule.

What do you mainly use Charitylog for?

We use it to capture data about our clients and track how we support them (services accessed, number of support sessions, etc). Our clients' data is highly sensitive, and because Charitylog is accredited against ISO 27001, I'm confident it's secure.

We also use it to plan capacity to minimise waiting times for support. For example, we have for the first time a comprehensive overview of what all our counsellors are doing, so we can identify when they will have capacity to support more clients, which is helping reduce our waiting list.

How is it going so far?

I’m over the moon with it. We’re collecting more detailed data about our clients which is helping us shape our services to better meet their needs.

It has delivered efficiencies that we have reinvested in our frontline services. It has enabled us to ‘go paperless’, which reduces our carbon footprint and has freed up space in our building. That means abuse victims are getting access to support more quickly and their experience is better, which aids their recovery.

Using Charitylog has reduced the workload of our admin staff by 50%. Our counsellors can now enter client notes straight onto the system, which is freeing up their time, too, so they can support more people. We thought they would struggle with this change, but it has gone brilliantly and they all love the new way of working.

It's also helping us secure more funding. We need great data/evidence to make compelling bids for support, and Charitylog is enabling this. It helped us secure new funding worth £420,000 from the Department of Health and Social Care to support clients at risk of suicide.

We’ve been told recently by key funders that the quality of the data they get from Safeline is exceptional, and that's good for our reputation.

Would you recommend Charitylog?

Yes, the return on investment is just phenomenal. I would recommend Charitylog to everybody.