Even on Worthing Pier .....

Whilst walking on Worthing Pier this weekend my eye was drawn to one of many pictures as part of a community art project:

There is just no escape from girl guiding ever, and my family agreed. I'm assuming the building above the Trefoil is a guiding HQ in Worthing?

Updating girls records on the new GO

It is worth noting that unless the individual girl's record has emergency contact details added any changes will not be accepted on GO. The error message isn't very helpful - it does tell you to complete the missing address fields, but omits to mention its referring to the fields for the emergency contact!

After logging in and out a few times my length of service & years in guiding have been filled in, and I noticed this evening that all my roles over 32 years have now been added. I was sad to see last week that my history was missing. I had printed my roles off from my old Go! record, so I had a paper record to refer too for posterity.

It is faster to add & update records and to save to excel to create registers. I adore the new starting section leaflets which has been updated, but is now out of sync with the one on the GG UK website. However you can fill in unit details and save for future use so a step forward. Adding a new "daughter" is easy, but when you transfer a brownie to guides you do get a message back to say successful but it looks like the girl is still on your unit. Maybe a bit more work needed.

The bug page, as I discovered, isn't very comprehensive but overall I would say a 100% improvement over what we have been using. Hopefully the momentum for improvement will continue now its finally started.

Dropbox additional space - word of warning

Dropbox has been an excellent resource for sharing documents and photographs around leaders for training purposes and downloading from my phone to my laptop. Yesterday, however, I had a message to say my free year of additional space is going to expire in a months time and that I could keep this space for an extra £70 annual subscription with 20% discount.

I have spent an hour this afternoon working through my folders moving documents to new folders on a USB stick and deleting the content from Dropbox. Looks like the free limit is 3 GB and what is left is well within that, and mainly photographs. Be warned if you have been sharing documents on Dropbox, don't ignore the warning about your free 20 GB additional space expiring!

Impact Report 2015

Impact Report 2015

I like visiting the Guide shop at Commonwealth HQ on Buckingham Palace Road - they even opened a minute before 9am for me on Saturday morning so I could get work on time. I especially like checking the leaflets on the coffee table as you sometimes see things aimed at press and publicity that doesn't get sent out to Leaders or Trainers. This time I struck lucky I picked up a copy of the A4 colour Being our Best brochure that has been a nightmare to print off the website - I've used a loan copy for a number of activities and ice breakers already.

I also found something called Impact Report 2015, which I've never seen before. It includes some really useful quotes called voices or our members and the other half looks like a traditional annual report under the heading of the difference we've made. Page 10 talks about the national trainers conference in 2015;

 "Our Trainers' conference in Staffordshire was attended by 300 hard-working, committed and passionate Trainers from across the UK. The conference provides Trainers with the confidence to deliver expert training to volunteers - so our volunteers can then deliver a 21st century programme of activities to girls, as well as a guiding experience that's of the very best quality."

They are talking about us!