Features
The following is a short tour of some of the features of the Three Rings service:
Logging In
Each of your volunteers will have their own unique username and a password they've chosen themselves, which they can use to log in to the secure website. You can add accounts for as many volunteers as you need to.
Volunteers don't need an e-mail address to have an account: all they need is internet access - at your organistion's office, at home, at work, or anywhere else. Three Rings has been designed to be standards-compliant, and can even be used from mobile phones, video game consoles, and screen-readers for the blind.
Latest News
Share the latest news, policies, and organisational developments with your volunteers using the news system: the latest news appears to volunteers as soon as they log in, alongside other key information.
Events
By putting events on the Three Rings calendar, you're putting them right where your team will look for them: on the same calendar they use to sign up for shifts. But more than that, they'll also be reminded about upcoming events when they log in, right alongside their upcoming shift summary.
We've worked hard to put the information that most volunteers need most often no more than a glance away, so you spend less time clicking, and more time getting the answers you're after.
The Rota
In many ways, the rota is the core of Three Rings' functionality - the place where your volunteers can check up on their upcoming shifts and sign up for extra duties, and where your administrators can check that your organisation is keeping a healthy calendar of slots being filled.
Whether you run a self-sign-up, part-managed, or fully-managed rota — however much control your volunteers have over their own work patterns — Three Rings has been engineered to be flexible enough to adapt to the way that you already work: you don't have to change the way you already do things.
Set up rotas for all of the shifts that you run: the people on duty, their leaders or those responsible for them, or the people who've put their name down to back them up or whose job it is to ensure that a given week is satisfied. However you work, Three Rings is ready for you.
Volunteers can sign up to shifts with just two clicks, and see the results of their action in real time. You can set up rules about who can sign up with whom based on their level of experience (if you operate a "probationer" or "newbie" system), and can even configure the system to allow people to pull themselves out of shifts only if they give a sufficient amount of notice.
The Directory
All of your volunteers appear in the directory, along with (optional) photos, so your team can quickly find one another. Three Rings' integrated architecture ensures that all your data is inter-related, so you can also get to a volunteer's directory page by clicking on their name on the rota or anywhere else on the system.
Once you're on an individual volunteer's directory page, you've got access to their contact and other information, which they're able to keep up-to-date all by themselves. You'll never again have half-accurate lists of photocopied phone numbers littering your office.
Comms
Volunteers you authorise can easily send one another — or the entire organisation — e-mails and text messages to keep each other in the loop. Mobile phone text messages, while charged separately from your Three Rings subscription, are an economical way to hunt for last-minute duty fillers and to send out reminders about meetings and training events... and it's a lot easier to type a text message on a keyboard than on a mobile phone keypad!
And, of course, just like everything else in Three Rings, everything gets logged so you can track who is using the system and how.
Filestore
Three Rings includes a powerful filestore that allows you to keep copies of your important documents in a safe, centrally-available location. Upload training materials, publicity, policy documents, financial records, or anything else to the filestore, set the permissions of who can access it, and that's it — it's securely stored and your volunteers can get access to it when they need it.
All of the changes you make are version-controlled, so when you upload a revised copy of a document the old version is kept and can be retrieved or rolled-back to whenever you need to.
Wikis
If you need a new way to collaborate on a project, you could try using the Three Rings wiki engine, built right into the system. Wikis are collaborative document workspaces where your volunteers can type notes and share ideas with one another, and they're a great way to plan events or develop strategies. They're also good for just keeping an easily-accessible notepad, for example an office shopping list or maintenance log.
Other features
Three Rings also features a highly customisable system of roles & permissions, statistics generation, a skinnable user interface with a selection of themes, a "simple mode" for less computer-confident volunteers, full logs of everything that occurs on your organisation's account, and much more. We'll be describing these features in more detail on this page at a later date, but for now, feel free to get in touch and we can arrange for a demonstration.