Principal activities of the company

We are a social club run by volunteers, where users come for friendly help with their technology.

Additional information

Every Tuesday morning, we send out a newsletter to our 630+ club members to remind them that club is happening in the afternoon. There is also a Facebook and Instagram post published at the same time (when the tech works!). We keep our website updated (https://five-bells-computerclub.mailchimpsites.com/). Our printed flyers are on the counter in the pub and have been handed out to local phone and computer shops and repairers. Our flyers are also left at local food banks, gyms, doctor’s surgeries, libraries, Churches, etc. We have attended two local U3A events where we have chatted to people there and handed out our leaflets (which has resulted in about 30 new members each time). We have a couple of 2 metre stand-up posters which we erect wherever we are. We recently entered a Tech4Good award competition. We were not shortlisted, but the resulting video is now doing a good job of promoting the club on our website. Last summer we split our busy WhatsApp group into three groups which are active, during times when the club is not running. We have one group for ‘volunteers’ to keep in touch with each other, and post solutions they’ve found to more unusual problems. We have a second ‘tech’ WhatsApp Group for our members to post their problems and hopefully one of our volunteers will answer in time. And the third WhatsApp group is a ‘social’ group - just for fun – whatever the members want to talk about, jokes etc. There were over 1000 attendances at our Tuesday Club sessions (including learners and volunteers) over the past academic year, which is an impressive number considering we only run for two hours a week during term times. In addition to total numbers, we track the number of distinct individuals who attend the Club sessions because that is a useful indicator to our sponsors of how widely we are spreading our help. The fact that we had 98 different learners attending during the last term goes to show that, in addition to the "social attendees" who come very often, we are reaching a good number of people who come once or twice just to get their problems sorted out. Over the whole year it is 242 individuals and the average number of the 36 possible sessions attended is Volunteers 13.7, Learners 3.1 We have some social attenders who live alone and come along every week just to socialise. An average session has around 18 learners and 10 to 11 volunteers, a ratio of 1.7. The ratio of learners to volunteers is crucial: somewhere between 1.5 to 2 is manageable, beyond 2 to 1 people waiting for help can get frustrated. We were forced to implement a 20-minute time limit per learner after one particularly fraught session, a rule which is still in place but more discreetly managed. In spite of hot weather and some crowded sessions we seem to have avoided any more unpleasant incidents. Recent attendance has been between 24 and 40 people for each session. One of the main attractions of the Club is that you can turn up without booking or having to describe your problems in advance, but still have a reasonable expectation of getting help. Individual volunteers sometimes write accounts of what they did today at a session, but this is not done for statistical purposes. Going forward, we will supplement statistics with individual case histories, and attempt to measure the club’s impact on the community. Our major teaching event was the Five Bells Digital Workshops 2025. We ran 13 workshops from September to December 2025. A total of 246 learners attended, making an average class of 19. The average number of workshops a learner attended was 3.4. There were 5 volunteers on average at each workshop and volunteers attended 4.9 workshops on average. Number of Participants & Seating Arrangements We had between 10 and 25 participants show up to each session, with at least 4 volunteerseach time. We tried to group people with similar devices at the tables. The participants enjoyed talking around their tables and seeing that other users had the same challenges. The attendees would help each other and could be guided by the volunteers when necessary. This system also worked well. Conclusion This was a great experience for us, and the general feedback was very positive. The venue proved very popular, and many residents of East Finchley were pleased to find out about this excellent local venue with its large garden, which can also be hired for social functions. We are grateful to The National Lottery Community Fund for the funding, allowing us to go ahead with this. The club is a successful venture promoting free digital and social inclusion for older people in North London. It is a valued source of friendly help in the community. Some people come along just for a cup of tea and a chat, whilst others are eager for someone to help them with their tech. We plan to continue for as long as we are needed. Many thanks to Steve and the team at the Five Bells pub for reserving tables for us every week, and for making us feel so welcome (and for serving so many cups of tea and coffee with smiles!

This report was approved by the board of directors on 8 July 2026
and signed on behalf of the board by:

Name: Alan Judes
Status: Director