The process is designed to be comprehensive yet straightforward and user-friendly.
At all stages, our approachable and experienced Assessment Team will provide support and guidance, ensuring you have everything required to submit your evidence and experience a seamless assessment day.
Application and submission
The certification process takes a holistic view of the whole helpline and is an assessment, as opposed to an audit.
- At the start of the process, you will receive a guidebook to help you collect evidence for your submission
- We allow six months from application to assessment. However, we understand timescales can change and we will work with you to accommodate these where possible.
- During the six months, you complete the submission and upload your evidence to the shared folders.
- As you work towards the end of the six-month period, we will contact you to introduce your assessor and arrange a mutually convenient assessment day.
The process gave us many opportunities to analyse our systems and thereby improve the service we provide. The accreditation gave a welcome boost to the confidence and wellbeing of our helpline team, other staff, donors and trustees.
Assessment day and report
Assessment days for the Helplines Standard usually run for a full day. We will visit your organisation, but where preferred, can carry out assessments remotely.
- The first part of the day involves reviewing your written submission together, gaining further clarification in areas where needed, and discussing procedures in more detail.
- The second part of the day is where we observe the operations of your helpline by listening to calls and reviewing all other channels of support you are using. We also have an informal chat with two or three members of your helpline team.
- We may find that we need further documentary evidence to support practice and if so, we will allow extra time for this.
- The report is then subject to Helplines Partnership’s internal verification process before a final decision on awarding certification is made.
- You can highlight areas of excellence to funders and stakeholders.
- Recommendations and/or requests for improvements to support the best practice of your service will also be included.
After the assessment
Helplines Standard certification lasts for three years before your organisation may choose to apply for re-certification to ensure the high standards set through the certification are maintained. During this three-year period, there are no additional fees, and we will always be on hand to support organisations with any issues or queries they may have.
At the mid-point (18 months) we will contact you to request an update on the recommendations we made in the report, including any major service changes. We will contact you approximately nine months before the expiry date of your certification to discuss the process of re-certification.