Milestone: Blackwater, due for release this May, is the second ‘River’ release of Three Rings, named by Becca after the Blackwater whose course runs close by her relatives homes in Essex.
Key Feature: Three Rings is already fully GDPR-compliant – but in Milestone: Blackwater we’re introducing even more tools to help organisations manage volunteer data appropriately.
We know you can’t take any chances with volunteer data, so we built Three Rings to be secure. None of your data is ever sent unencrypted. We make hourly backups of everything on Three Rings, and we have robust policies in place to stop unauthorised access to your account.
We’ve built Three Rings to be easy for everyone, even if they’ve barely used a computer before. If you do get stuck, our Support Team are just an email away – and we promise to reply within 24 hours, every single day of the year.
We believe trust is important – Three Rings helps to keep some of the UK’s biggest charities running, and every one of our clients deserves to know we’re doing our best for them. It’s very unusual for anything to go seriously wrong with Three Rings, but if it does, we’ll tell you – and explain what we’re doing to stop it happening again.
We’re passionate about volunteering – in fact we’re all volunteers ourselves. That means we put our users first, and when we develop new features for Three Rings, we make sure to do so based on how much help they can be for the organisations we support.
At the heart of Three Rings is a powerful Rota tool: you track as many shifts and events as you need, control who can sign up and pull out of specific shifts, and highlight where there are gaps in your scheduling.
Three Rings automatically keeps track of your volunteers’ statistics: you can keep tabs on everything from who’s done how many shifts to what percentage of shifts have been left unfilled – even who can best fill a shift at short notice.
The Directory is where Three Rings stores data on your volunteers. Like everything else in Three Rings you can use our powerful Roles tool to limit who can see, and who can edit, what information – so you know your volunteers’ data is secure.
The Comms system is a built in email and SMS tool: you can send messages to specific volunteers or teams at your organisation with a few simple clicks – and avoid sharing their contact details in insecure spreadsheets.
The Three Rings Filestore offers a secure repository for your organisation’s data: you can store everything from procedures manuals to training details and committee minutes – and limit access to each Folder based on a user’s Roles.
The Admin Tab is at the heart of Three Rings’ incredible flexibility: from here you can customise the system so that it works the way your organisation works – because you should never have to change what works for you when the software could change instead.
Three Rings has been run by and for volunteers since 2002 – through our work here, our team support over 28,000 volunteers at 300 organisations!
When you make computer software it’s sometimes hard to remember that it’s being built by people (especially when it’s as good as Three Rings!).
You can learn about our core teams below, or click through to find out who we are, and how you can be part of our amazing work.
If you get stuck and Three Rings Help doesn’t solve your problem, the Support Team are on hand to answer any questions you have about Three Rings – contact us any time: we aim to respond within a maximum of 24 hours, any day of the year – even Christmas!
The Dev Team are the people who build and maintain Three Rings itself: when you contact us with a feature suggestion for a future release, it’s added to their ‘To Do’ list!
The Three Rings Communications Team is responsible for producing the System Help, maintaining the public website, and organising our presence at conferences and events to meet our users face to face – always a pleasure!
They also co-ordinate the grand annual Christmas Card signing when we get to send cards to every organisation using Three Rings – you can see cards from previous years here!
Our Welcome Team handle demonstrations and answer any questions organisations have about Three Rings and what it can do to help them. They’re also responsible for importing your data if you’re moving from another online system, a set of complex spreadsheets – or even pens and paper!
Over 380 organisations in the UK and worldwide use Three Rings, managing more than 33,000 volunteers to deliver over 4.3 million hours of volunteer effort in 2017.
