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The RNLI’s training and development manager, Marie Smith, explains why the charity took part in Adult Learners’ Week in the UK in May this year, and how creating a fun and inspiring program of activities and job shadowing opportunities was beneficial and rewarding for staff.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a one‐stop shop to deliver blended learning for crew, volunteers and staff of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

The paper discusses the reasons for developing the new system, the form it takes and the results it has achieved.

The paper explains that resources are now classified by RNLI competencies, with key ones linked to personal‐development plans. Staff can add performance goals and link these to relevant courses. Crew can see their training‐assessment status and service history. And other volunteers have development plans guiding them to recommended courses and resources.

The paper reveals that, in the first ten weeks alone, more than 1,000 people used the new system, compared with the previous annual average of 300.

The paper highlights the role of the Charity Learning Consortium in bringing together more than 100 charities, housing associations and not‐for‐profit organizations to make e‐learning more affordable and effective.

The paper provides eight tips for e‐learning success.

Few people approaching appraisal would admit to facing the prospect with anything but apprehension; that empty feeling in the stomach, maybe a sleepless night beforehand and a huge sigh of relief when it is over and done with – until the next time. Not that managers or supervisors – the people doing the appraising – feel any better about the prospect. They are possibly just as nervous about the procedure, maybe even more so. Being criticized about your performance at work is bad enough, but having to dish out that critical feedback can be just as bad.

It is a well held belief that the full moon period and the date Friday 13th has an impact on the number of emergency call outs for emergency services. The purpose of this paper is to critically explore that belief. It also examines the versatility and richness of response records, and demonstrates the effectiveness of combining data sets.

The work takes four varied data sets, from four rescue agencies along with the International Search and Rescue Database and compared the average number of calls on a full moon night, non-full moon and full moon period (the full moon night, the day before and day after). The average number of incidents on Friday 13th was also investigated. It uses a statistical approach to test the difference between “normal” dates and those dates traditionally believed to be busier.

Although there were differences between Friday 13th, full moon nights, full moon periods and “normal” days, the differences were in general extremely small, not significantly significant and in most cases actually dropped during the supposedly unlucky period. The exception to this is a very small increase in the average number of responses during full moons for most data sets, although this was not statistically significant. This paper concludes that there is no evidence in the data for any impact of the full moon upon rescue teams’ activities.

This research deals with a small set of responses, from the UK only, and addresses an issue that is clearly not the most pressing. However, it does demonstrate evidenced-based management in practice, in that resources have incorrectly been assigned in the past to these dates.

This work shows that preconceptions exist within the emergency services and that, without evidence-led management, resources can be allocated on hearsay. This shows that widely available software and techniques can be applied to organisational data and used to make management decisions more appropriate.

Rescue organisations are almost exclusively charity or public sector organisations, meaning that their budgets are sourced from donations or the tax-payer. Putting to bed misconceptions over resources for certain dates will ultimately benefit society in those terms.

There has been very little work on this phenomenon, although some works on A&E department admissions have taken place. This is the only work to date to combine data in this way for this purpose.

A significant management issue for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is the disconnect between services beneficiaries and the funders of those services. Individual donors and fundraisers provide the resources to enable other people (or animals) to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to address this service management challenge through new types of customer service interactions that bring together service donors and service recipients through innovative digital communication.

Based on a review, and illustrated by recent examples of innovative best practice, the authors develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

The paper starts by identifying the problem of “nonprofit service disintermediation”. The paper also outlines the inadequacies of popular frameworks of communication, widely taught in business schools, to understand the new reality of customer-service organisation engagement in the digital age. Through adopting a customer engagement lens, the paper develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

Given the authors’ focus on the intersection between new communication opportunities and customer service interactions, this paper adds novel insight to theory and raises important implications for management.

The paper explores how, through these new communication interactions, engagement with, and loyalty to, the brand is built over time in a fluid and dynamic way. It identifies a disintermediated relationship, distinct to other service contexts, but significant in terms of value and social impact.