Railway Children is an international children's charity working in the UK, India and East Africa. Its aim is to change the lives of children living alone or at risk on the streets. It partners with grassroots organisations that can offer invaluable local knowledge to manage and implement regional projects. 

Railway Children Case Study

The Railway Children looks after the needs of street children around the world. More than 100,000 under 16 year olds run away from home in the UK alone each year, so the Railway Children has an enormous task ahead of it. Based in Cheshire, the charity needed a way to communicate with its international branches, helping children in Tanzania, Kenya and India.

A platform for international collaboration

“We work through partner organisations worldwide so we can take advantage of the knowledge of local people. We needed a common platform for each team to provide updates and share information,” explains David Brookes, Head of Finance, Railway Children. “In order to carry out our work effectively and efficiently, it’s essential for all of us to be working from the same data.”

With its version control feature, Huddle enables staff to keep track of the most recent version of each file. This is particularly important when it comes to time sensitive or very detailed documents that the charity relies on such as partner agreements, project reports and expenditure returns.

Online and on the go

Rather than having separate files for the same document, staff at the Railway Children can just flip through previously uploaded versions, keeping all versions of a single document in one place. With everything on one central platform, the charity can work more flexibly; staff can log into the online portal in the office, at home or on the go.

“We can upload documents to Huddle at any time and we always know that the other teams are using the correct document versions. When relying on emails, there can be miscommunication and it’s not always clear which attachment is the most up-to-date document,” comments Brookes.

Driving technology forwards

Before Huddle, Railway Children had a bespoke extranet but staff found it very complex and hard to update: “The only way to update it was to go back to the developer, it just wasn’t fit for the job so it fell out of use. With Huddle, we can drive the technology ourselves, creating workspaces and adding new users as we need to,” explains Brookes. Huddle enables staff to collaborate together online. With its comments features, staff can comment on documents, providing context and further details on reports and case studies.

“We keep collaborative information in Huddle, from reports through to case studies and marketing materials. It’s made things much simpler for us. We can see how our different teams are working and meeting their objectives. Huddle’s easy to use interface means it also caters for the varying levels of IT experience of our staff,” said Brookes.