Gaisce, The President’s Award
Gaisce, The President’s Award is Ireland’s National Challenge Award, the country’s most prestigious and respected individual award programme, and a challenge from the President of Ireland, to young people between 15 and 25 years of age.
Internationally Gaisce, the President’s Award is part of The International Award a self-development programme available to all 14 to 25 year olds that grew out of the Duke of Edinburgh awards in the UK. Over 7 million young people worldwide have taken up the Award challenge
Our goal with the project was to take the admin out of the award allowing the resources of the organisation to be spent on the young people participating in the awards.
- In the past the award was very paper based
- Every year 17,000 - 20,000 young people partake in the award in Ireland. The participant would fill out an application form, send it back and two very nice ladies in Gaisce would then type all the applications into a database.
- Gaisce then send out a booklet that the participant would fill out weekly outlining what they did.
- At the end of the award period the supervisor would write up a report of the participant’s activity and post it.
- Each participant had to pay €10 to do the award. This was paid by the participant’s parent by cheque or collected in cash and submitted by the school.
- Now moved the entire process online
- We remodelled our portal and focused it for Gaisce’s purpose.
- The registration process is done online, as is the payment.
- Mobile apps allow the users to update their online profile while on the move.
- The teacher reviews the participant’s activity online and ticks a box to sign off on their application, saving days of work which helps encourage more schools to add the program
- All the paperwork is gone, the need to keep the booklets is gone, the payments are integrated and reporting is improved.
- New Child protection requirements are much easier managed online.
- Gaisce can now get detailed user statistics on what the participants do in the program. In total we have taken €100,000+ a year in costs out of the charity.
- Gaisce also has greatly reduced the admin time of the volunteers who help
- We are rolling this project out over the summer in advance of the new school year in Sept
- We donated €50,000 worth of development time to date to the project. We don’t donate the entire project cost as we like our Social Partners to take ownership and responsibility for the project
- For phase 2 of the project we are hoping to licence the project to some of the other 180 countries where the awards are run. This will hopefully begin to earn Gaisce a steady recurring and hopefully allow them to recoup their investment in the project.