Government departments which aren’t meeting Compact obligations have been put under the spotlight by NCVO’s Compact Advocacy Programme, which represents voluntary organisations in such cases. The Home Office is identified as the worst offender.

Common problems reported by organisations include: not paying in advance for delivering key services; not giving enough time to respond to consultations; not paying the full costs of delivering key services; not discussing the risks of projects up front. News release at http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/press/releases/?id=4584.

The full results of nfpSynergy’s annual Virtual Promise survey tracking charities’ use of, and attitudes to, the internet have been published for 2006.

Consisting of loads of graphs, the pdf (804kb) can be found via the Reports section on http://www.nfpsynergy.net .

E-petitions can be a good facility for local authorities to offer, according to pioneer Bristol City Council, and they should not be dissuaded by the recent controversy on the service provided by the Prime Minister’s web site.

“It’s been really useful for raising issues that councillors hadn’t thought of, and for finding out public opinion” reports E-Government Bulletin.

A new ‘e-democracy in Bristol’ guide explains the whole range of electronic options. A chunk 5.5MB pdf from http://www.kevinomalley.org/downloads/ebook.pdf.

The American Red Cross has managed to stop the use of a web site name which is a slight mis-typing of their own. http://www.redcrosss.org had connected to first-aid certification programs, disaster relief funds, and various other commercial web sites.

Read the item at Domain Dispute Blog,
http://domaindisputeblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/american-red-cross-reclaims.html. NB The web address doesn’t seem to have been pointed in the right direction quite yet.

BT has launched a climate change web site which includes a carbon footprint calculator - aimed more at individuals than organisations but an office could collate information or results. http://www.btplc.com/climatechange/.

Michael Gilbert, of Nonprofit Online News/Gilbert Centre, has come up with the Mission-Resource Matrix as a response to the for-profit Growth-Share Matrix from the Boston Consulting Group.

Billed as a ‘Framework for Evaluating Civil Society Projects’, it is a classic 2 by 2 matrix, with Deployable Resources as one axis and Mission Related Impact on the other. See http://news.gilbert.org/MissionResourceMatrix.

The charities Gingerbread and One Parent Families are to merge. According to News Alert from Governance magazine, the decision to combine operations had been driven primarily by the reform of the Child Support Agency and government proposals to get more lone parents back to work.

Three new guides have been launched at the ‘Stress and the Role of Line Managers’ conference run by CIPD, the personnel professionals body. They include ‘Managing stress at work - A competency framework for line managers’ and ‘Advice for line managers’.

These can be downloaded from the web site of joint publisher HSE at http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/news.htm, or from CIPD.

‘Managing conflict at work’ is a new booklet from Acas, the employment relations service, designed to help employers and employees better understand and manage all types of conflict at work.

The six step guide can be read online or downloaded as a pdf at http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1218.

A one stop shop to allow organisations and individuals to carry out their own fire safety assessment has been launched by the government. The Fire Gateway web site (http://www.fire.gov.uk ) is also a portal for fire and rescue services in England, and some services can be requested online.

For workplace compliance and assessment, see http://www.fire.gov.uk/Workplace+safety/LegalObligations/.

The Social Exclusion Task Force, based in the Cabinet Office, has issued a call for evidence for its Families At-Risk Review. This provides “a unique opportunity for you to help identify key lessons from practice and research that will be used to inform the direction of the review, and improve outcomes for some of the most excluded children and families”.

The call is being administered by the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion - complete a short electronic questionnaire via http://survey.cesi.org.uk/setf/MainPage.htm. There are also a couple of related events. Cabinet Office news item.

Government proposals to introduce an unclaimed assets scheme in the UK, in order to allow money in dormant bank and building society accounts to be reinvested in society, were published last Tuesday (20th March). This does not include the distribution mechanism, which will be covered by a further consultation later in the spring.

Press release at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2007/press_33_07.cfm, consultation document in pdf, 513kb, at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/658/50/consult_unclaimedasset200307.pdf. Deadline for responses is 12th June.