Improving Impact and Positive Outcomes for a Child Bereavement Charity

Pro Bono OR was contacted by Sarah Hext, the founder of the Harvey Hext Trust. The Harvey Hext Trust was created to honour the memory of her late son, Harvey. The purpose of the organisation is to gift personalised Memory Boxes to children who have lost a sibling or parent, to help them in their grieving process.

Since its foundation in 2016, The Harvey Hext Trust has helped hundreds of families, however it hadn’t yet documented in a structured way how many Memory Boxes they have gifted, or when and where they have been sent. They wanted to create a database for this information, to enable them to grow and expand their service to areas they have not yet reached.

First, it was determined that the data collection had to be based on the invoices issued by the trust’s supplier, since they were the organisation that sent the boxes to families.

Within each invoice, the main data to be collected were the type and number of items, delivery postal code and invoice date. Once all the invoices were gathered as individual pdf files, they were scraped to extract the main data using Power Query in Excel.

The database and report were subsequently designed in Excel to produce a user-friendly interface that the trust could continue working with.

Under the supervision of the volunteer analyst, the trust started adding new invoices to the database, also including a new item that was recently added to the portfolio of items gifted by the trust (“Holdall” bags).

The solution to the Harvey Hext Trust’s problem was twofold:

• A database in the form of an Excel
• A report in Excel, including summary tables and charts that refresh dynamically as the database is updated. 

The Harvey Hext Trust used this project as the kick-off for a more structured data collection process as their activities expand. Their achievements and impact are now transparent and quantified, and they can be incorporated in grant applications, website content and general communication activities. Additionally, gaps in their current geographic coverage can be identified and proactively tackled.

For more information about Pro Bono OR, please contact [email protected]. We want to hear from you if you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have a charity in mind for a Pro Bono OR project.