Release - Drugs, the Law and Human Rights

Release is a charity based in London who provides drug addiction and legal advice help-line services. Release is an internationally acclaimed organisation that provides a high standard of care with drug usage advice and addressing the complex legal issues which arise when civil rights are affected by drug addiction. In addition, they have assisted UK Government in their battle against drug abuse.

Skylark have provided a full service IT support program to Release, having establish a complete call centre infrastructure, telephone exchange linked to contact management and call tracking software, with an integrated website. The call centre uses the latest technology to provide and TrixBox and Asterix based phone system for the drugs help-line. The system is linked to a contact management system which logs all calls and provides call history and contact details, for basic enquiries, through to a case management system, when a call is transferred to the legal advice team.

TrixBox based call centre

Skylark has implemented the latest in low-cost open-architecture phone systems for Release. The key feature is that the system is based on a standard PC server and needs no mandatory ‘black magic’ maintenance contract, as traditional proprietary phone systems require. Please see more details about Skylark’s phone systems.

Contact Management

Skylark developed a contact management and call logging system to provide the all-important case tracking capability which is necessary when supporting individuals in legal situations. This system is available to the call center and legal advice teams, and runs from a powerful relational database. Read more about Skylark’s small systems development capability.

Website Development

Skylark has developed a website for Release (www.release.org.uk) that showcases the services that the charity provides to the community. Productivity is greatly enhanced when producing websites with the use of tools such as Drupal and Wordpress to ensure that development time is minimised. Read more about Skylark’s web development capability.

IT Support

Skylark provide Release with high quality IT support services to keep this technology dependent operation running. Whether remote or onsite, issues are resolved with the agreed service standards, and the management regular maintenance tasks are handled by Skylark. Often issues are addressed by Skylark before Release even knows about them! Read more about Skylark’s IT support capability.

“Low Profit” Services

Skylark provides a ‘low profit’ service to Release, as it offers to all charitable organisations. This is possible by using the most productive tools with open source software, and by keeping company overheads to a minimum. At Skylark we pride ourselves by providing a highly technical support service with a social conscience.

Other charities in Skylark’s client portfolio:

• Marine Conservation Society
• Talking Drugs
• International Drug Policy Consortium
• Children's Rights Alliance for England
• Youth R.I.S.E.