In this blog post, we look at some of our philosophy and values here at Three Rings CIC, and what it means for us to focus our efforts on selling Three Rings to community enterprises, charities, and voluntary organisations, rather than to large for-profit organisations
What do we aim to do?
Three Rings exists to support volunteer and community enterprises, and we aim to do that by delivering professional enterprise software at affordable prices. That’s important to us not just because we’re all volunteers ourselves, but also because many of our longest-serving team members started their volunteering careers in organisations that had very low budgets (not just “low” in general, but often “low, even among that type of organisation”).
Back in 2002, we knew two things about Three Rings: firstly, it was an incredibly powerful tool that could make it significantly easier to run a voluntary organisation, and secondly, the organisations we worked with would benefit from it most – and we could stop using pens and paper!
Three Rings weren’t the only people working on the problem of efficient volunteer management back then – 2002 was a busy time for online rotas, and another system, NIRIS, was doing some very similar work, based on the needs of Sheffield Nightline.
Thirteen years ago, Aberystwyth Nightline didn’t have a huge budget. As Liz, the coordinator at the time, later wrote, the idea of putting the rota online was very exciting (the paper rota in those days was at the top of a pretty steep hill!) but the sad reality was that the annual cost of NIRIS was far, far beyond the budget. It was a big disappointment, but it proved there was a genuine demand for volunteers to be able to manage their shifts online, as long as it could be made affordable – we weren’t the only ones tired of the old-fashioned “sign up book” after all!
That early disappointment – the feeling of regret at finding something that could really make it easier for our volunteers to do what they do best, only to find they can’t afford it – stuck with us, and helped cement out belief that professional software for third sector organisations shouldn’t force charities to choose between effective volunteer management and essential upkeep and publicity. We’re not kidding when we say we’re genuinely passionate about what we do here: for the next 7 years, we funded Three Rings out of our own pockets to make sure Nightlines on a limited budget didn’t have to cut back to make life easier for their volunteers.
Even when Three Rings began to expand to help people working for more and more organisations, we kept our belief that quality software can be affordable right at the heart of what we do. Our growth meant it wasn’t possible to keep funding Three Rings by ourselves anymore, but we made sure to use proven, scalable, open-source technologies to power the system and avoid any situations where we’d be forced to pass unnecessary costs on to our users.
When our client base diversified further, when we started supporting community shops, theatres, and homeless shelters, we sat down and spent a long time working out the best way to restructure our prices to make sure they remained fair for everyone: we even managed to find a solution that gave the majority of our customers either a slight fall, or no change, in their annual subscription costs without being unfair towards much bigger and richer organisations.
Who do we aim to help?
Three Rings is an incredibly powerful, incredibly flexible, and incredibly good value. And that’s great! That’s exactly what we, as volunteers, have been aiming for ever since 2002: enterprise software delivered at prices charities and community organisations can pay without compromising their core goals or their budget. We’re here to support community and volunteer-run organisations as well as charities: it’s the satisfaction of supporting such groups that means volunteers are willing to give their time and skills to growing and supporting Three Rings.
But it’s not just community enterprises and charities that benefit from rota management software. Big businesses need it, too. And – if Three Rings CIC was a different sort of company – that might be the point where this blog post introduces our newest customer, MultinationalMegaBucks Inc. But of course, we’re not like other companies, and we’re pretty proud of that. So instead, this is the point where this blog post explains exactly why we often find ourselves turning large for-profit companies away when they ask to use Three Rings.
Naturally, responsible managers and business owners want to find better ways to optimise employee scheduling. And sometimes they’ll find themselves here, reading about Three Rings and (understandably!) getting excited by everything it can do.
It’s probably a big disappointment when they get in touch and we have to explain that we don’t sell Three Rings to big corporate businesses. It doesn’t happen very often, but it generally comes up a few times a year, and our response usually takes them by surprise.
Of course, while many of our customers are charities, many also set out to make a profit. For example, lots of community shops (such as our good friends at the Plunkett foundation) are for-profit concerns: that’s usually the nature of a shop! And that’s fine – we won’t turn away any social enterprises that want to use Three Rings: together with charities and community organisations, they’re exactly the kind of organisation that would benefit from Three Rings the most!
But a social enterprise running a business in order to further it’s own, primarily community-focused goals, is a very different proposition from a business whose main objective is the profit they can use to reward shareholders. Big business is more interested in how much profit they can make than the community benefits that profit could support… and while it’s obvious to us at Three Rings that there’s a big difference, there’s still great demand for enterprise software similar to Three Rings, even in multinational businesses.
It’s not the sort of thing people think about very often, but for a lot of business models, having the right number of staff on shift at the right time is vitally important. Whether it’s a shop, a call centre, a fast-food restaurant, a post office… just about anywhere you have customer-facing staff, there are going to be busy times and quiet times. Scheduling who’s on shift at what time is a big part of management for these enterprises: if you have too few staff, customers have to wait longer and the quality of your service falls. If you have too many staff, you can provide a very fast service to everyone, but you’re paying more people than you have to… and that’s just the start of the complicated balancing act! Obviously, anything that could help to streamline that process is worth looking into!
So why, when businesses come to Three Rings and ask us to help, do we say no? Surely the extra income would be worth a bit more hassle or effort? Couldn’t we sell to big business and use that profit to offer even lower prices to the community groups and charities we already work so hard to support?
Not really – and we’ll explain our reasons for turning away large corporate customers in the blog post next week.