Film Education

Amanda White, Operations Executive

Movie industry sponsored company, Film Education was established fifteen years ago. This is a charity-based firm and it produces film-related teaching materials, events and teacher training sessions using film in the curriculum. They highlight the fact that film can be used in English lessons by studying text and the adaptation of the text to screenings of modern language films. The history of film is another area that’s covered too. Film Education encourages teachers to use the enthusiasm that students have for film to help them with a range of subjects like English and maths. The student age range covered is six to eighteen year olds.

Film Education has fourteen people working at their offices set in the heart of theatre land in Charing Cross Road. We met Amanda White, the Operations Executive, to see how SupportPlan has enhanced their business.

SupportPlan & Film Education

Film Education have been with SupportPlan for three years and are covered by the Pay As You Go contract, which has worked well for them. SupportPlan was aware from the start that, being a charity, finances would be tight for this company. Amanda explained, “They saved us money by looking at the computers we already had and told us which ones were worth keeping, which were going to die and how to get the most from the older ones.” She continued, “SupportPlan understood that we would be phasing in new computers over two years and so they assessed the situation by looking at what people were doing, what they required and helped to re-jig computers to suit the needs of the user.” Additionally, SupportPlan brought Amanda together with a staff training contact as she thought it was important for the staff to get training with regards to troubleshooting and the packages they were going to be using. “We don’t have a particularly technologically-minded work force. We have someone who looks after the web site and another who deals with basic daily IT problems but I needed the rest of the team to know more.” So SupportPlan put her in touch with a company who came and gave training on basic trouble shooting and using computers correctly.

SupportPlan Provides Solutions

Film Education only had one computer that sent and received emails when SupportPlan arrived on the scene, which was naturally inconvenient. So when the engineers installed the server and network cabling, they also ensured that everyone had access to the Internet and email. Amanda said, “I loved the fact that I could just hand it all over to SupportPlan.”

For six weeks of every year Film Education sets up a booking office at its premises for schools to phone in and book cinema tickets. They have shifted 100,000 tickets this year so one can only imagine the volume of calls. Amanda explained, “It’s a huge initiative called National Schools Film Week. We have a call centre manned by actors who use four computers and so it’s really important to us that the computers are really efficient and don’t break down. We need to know that we can get support very quickly.” SupportPlan successfully covered this procedure last year and again this year. The engineer set up the four networked I-Macs that were rented from SupportPlan, the system was uploaded and it’s run smoothly throughout the initiative. Amanda added, “Projects like this can potentially be very stressful but it’s a stress-free situation because I feel extremely confident in SupportPlan’s expertise.”. She concluded,” It’s been carried out efficiently and extremely successfully and nothing went wrong. I was confident as the manager of the project but SupportPlan also gave me confidence in the system they installed.”