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Back in February the Nightline Association announced that their charity would be closing at the end of June, while individual Nightlines would continue. As you may’ve seen, we responded by confirming that Three Rings will always be free to Nightlines, but we’ve also been in talks with the Nightline Association to ensure we’re doing all we can to minimise the impact of the Nightline Association closing down on individual Nightlines’ operations.

One of the core services the Nightline Association provides for Nightlines has been the Nightline Portal system, which offers secure, online, logging and anonymous messaging services. (Eagle-eyed readers will already have noticed a synergy between that description of Portal and Three Rings’ mission to deliver secure, online volunteer management tools!)

With the closure of the Association looming, the Portal software, developed by Nightline Association volunteers and hosted on the Nightline Association’s web domain, was at risk of being lost. Given the years of history Three Rings has of supporting Nightlines, we didn’t feel able to let that happen, so we have reached an agreement with the Nightline Association to take over the hosting and maintenance of Portal after the Association’s closure.

If your organisation isn’t a Nightline, this won’t affect you. Our team have ensured that adopting the Portal system won’t impact Three Rings, our development plans, our pricing, or the support we offer to your organisation.

If your organisation is a Nightline, then this shouldn’t affect you much, either! If you’re one of the Nightlines that uses Portal, do check your inbox (or ask your coordinators to check!) as we’ve already sent through some information about the planned migration date and the new URL you’ll need in order to access the system.

If you are a Nightline Association volunteer – especially if you’ve been working on Portal, then this could affect you, if you want! As volunteers ourselves – volunteers whove been watching and helping Three Rings grow since 2002 – we can imagine some of you are feeling a bit lost now the Association is closing. If you’d like to carry on the work you’ve been doing, then we’d like to offer you a home with Three Rings CIC. If that sounds tempting, please do get in touch!

Whatever your role, rest assured that our core mission is unchanged: our aim is still to use our time and skills to make sure Three Rings represents the best in low-cost, high quality volunteer management tools, and to do all we can to make it easier for the organisations we support to deliver on their goals.

At the same time, we didn’t feel we could stand by while a vital system that Nightlines rely on to operate was lost – and as the organisations we support are all charities or volunteer and community-run organisations themselves, we can be pretty confident that our users will understand.

You might have seen that our prices changed in April 2025, along with our whole pricing structure.

If you haven’t seen that, then some frequently asked questions about the changes are available here, and of course you can always find our latest prices on our Pricing page.

But, at the same time, it’s been a long time since the last major change to our pricing structure in 2014, so we thought it might be worth a brief blog post to revisit the ways in which we make sure we’re always offering the best value that we can.

A little bit of history

Our core goal at Three Rings has always been to ensure every voluntary and charitable organisation that would benefit from having access to high-quality online volunteer management tools can do so, and do so at the lowest price possible – but more than that we’ve always wanted to make sure that every organisation has the best rota and volunteer management for them whether or not that system is Three Rings!

(Sometimes, this confuses people – it’s certainly not how most companies work! – but when you remember that everyone involved in creating, maintaining, and running Three Rings does as a volunteer, it’s pretty simple. We’ve built Three Rings to be an incredibly scalable system, so we don’t need to chase growth or worry about saturation, market penetration, or hounding people with adverts until they decide to give us a go: all we care about is that a voluntary organisation has the right volunteer and rota management tools for their needs.)

But for any organisation that uses Three Rings our core goal is to make sure they’re getting high-quality and low-cost volunteer management tools, so we review our prices to make sure that they’re still fair – we’re a not-for-profit company, we’re run entirely by volunteers, and we started way back in 2002 in response to the organisation our founders volunteered for at that time being asked to pay more than their entire annual budget just for a rota management system.

Our last major review of our pricing structure took place in 2014, and we’ve grown significantly as an organisation since then, supporting a wider and wider range of organisations. Because of that, we dedicated most of 2024 to reviewing our pricing model, experimenting with different alternatives, possibilities, and cost projection exercises, and what we discovered was pretty simple.

First, it was clear that our prices could be brought down – sometimes significantly – and second it was equally obvious that our pricing structure needed to be made a lot simpler, both so our users can understand it more clearly, and also to help save our own volunteers time working out who goes in which pricing band!

So why are we changing the structure?

What we’ve found over the years, is that using a tiered pricing system – charging organisations with higher income, and more money, a higher rate than organisations with a lower income and less money, is the best way to keep the prices fair for everyone. In fact, this was the driving goal behind that 2014 pricing restucture: making our prices fairer. However, over the past ten years, as we’ve begun supporting more and more organisations, and more and more diverse organisations, that decade-old pricing structure has got to be pretty complicated!!

Back in 2007, our pricing structure looked like this:

Organisation Type	Band
Nightlines affiliated with the Nightline Association	N
Samaritans Branches (or anyone else)	S

…but Three Rings kept growing, attracting a wider and wider range of organisations using and benefitting from the system, and that meant our pricing system had to be expanded to try and maintain the balance of fairness for all those organisations. So, after the 2014 review, our 2015 pricing structure looked like this:

Organisation Income	Number of Volunteers	Band
< £50,000	Up to 20	A
< £50,000	21 – 60	B
< £50,000	61 – 140	C
< £50,000	141+	D
> £50,000, <£200,000	Any	E
> £200,000, <£400,000	Any	F
> £400,000	Any	G

…and still Three Rings kept on growing. Particularly as the volunteering landscape evolved across the late 2010s and early 2020s we’ve found the range of organisations we support, and the economic models they operate on have become much more varied. While there was often some variation between the annual income of Samaritans branches, that variation is nothing compared to the range of models that we have to factor in now we’re also supporting foodbanks, volunteer-run libraries, blood bikes, community shops and theatres and museums!

As we tried our best to adapt what began as a very simple and clear pricing structure to fairly match the needs of an increasingly complicated and diverse range of users, the structure itself got messier, until by 2024 the once clear and transparent pricing model we’d devised a decade before looked like this:

Organisation Income	Number of Volunteers	Band
< £6,500	Any	0
< £55,000	Up to 20	A
< £55,000	21 – 60	B
< £55,000	61 – 140	C
< £55,000	Over 140	D
< £85,000	Any	E
> £85,000, < £200,000	Any	F
> £200,000, < £400,000	Any	G
> £400,000 < £1,000,000	Any	H
> £1,000,000	Any	J

Really, at that point it seemed pretty obvious we needed to plan for a fundamental reset.

While you can see how we’ve tried to respond to the ever-increasing diversity of organisations relying on Three Rings by adding new layers and conditions to the pricing structure, it’s probably also pretty obvious that after 17 years of steady evolution and tweaks, the pricing structure had become a bit of a mess. Even though the reason it got so messy was to try and ensure the best deal for absolutely everyone, the end result was something that often seemed confusing and arbitrary – and in particular an organisation that suddenly got an influx of volunteers could suddenly jump up several bands, which sometimes left people feeling they were penalised for having more volunteers (pretty much the opposite of what we want to encourage!)

Simplifying Our Pricing Structure

But, if one of the reasons the old pricing structure became so complicated was because of the sheer breadth of organisations that now use Three Rings, that very growth also gave us an incredible opportunity to make some radical improvements. Together with the fact the system has always been built using extremely scalable, trusted open-source technologies, we could harness that growth to not only make things much simpler, but also to ensure that Three Rings offered even better value.

We’ve wanted to do this for some time (in addition to doing a lot of modelling during 2024, we’ve been working on pricing policies and improvements for some years, although parts of our ambition had tobe pushed back until after the 2022/3 energy crisis had settled down a bit!). After all that modelling and planning, though, we’ve come up with a new pricing structure that meets the key tests we set ourselves for evaluating whether the new model is fair enough to meet our standards:

First – it’s much simpler than the old pricing model, with fewer bands

Second – it preserves (and expands!) our Band Zero for very small or very new organisations

Third – it provides us with a strong foundation to keep developing and improving Three Rings as we’ve always done

Fourth – it rewards our users: your growth, passion, and support for Three Rings brought us to this point, so it’s important that our success is reflected back to the users: under the new model organisation using Three Rings either a) benefits from a price freeze, paying no more than they do now, or b) saves money compared to what they paid under the old pricing model

And Fifth – it eliminates the use of volunteer numbers as a factor in pricing¹, so that our organisations don’t get hit with a cost increase just because they’ve grown in size.

You can see the full details of the pricing plan (together with any updates if you’re reading this in some future year that isn’t 2025!) on our Pricing Page, but for the purposes of this explainer page, all invoices issued after the new pricing model came into effect on April 1st 2025 and is set at the following rates:

Band	Organisation Income	Number of Volunteers	Annual Subscription (Exl. VAT)	Annual Subscription (Inc. VAT)
Zero	< £6,500pa or <85,000pa	Any or (< 20)	FREE	FREE
One	< £85,000	Any	£145	£174
Two	> £85,000	Any	£225	£270

¹ The pricing model doesn’t completely eliminate the use of volunteer numbers to calculate prices, of course: an organisation with an annual income under £85,000 and with fewer than 20 volunteers is eligible for Band Zero, but their income moves them up into Band Two if they then expand to have 21 or more volunteers. We’ve done some pretty careful modelling around this and we’re confident this is still the fairest model, because it allows us to expand Band Zero to cover more of our users, including everyone who used to be in Band A.

(Plus, based on the sizes of organisations we currently support and their evolution over time, that there’s very few organisations likely to cross that line on a regular basis!).

In Conclusion

On paper, this is a bit of a pretty big change – but so was our change in 2014! And the driving philosophy is exactly the same: to ensure that the volunteers who give their time and skills to making Three Rings happen are helping you and your voluntary organisation to get the best possible deal for your volunteer and rota management system.

That, at least, isn’t changing, and it hasn’t changed in the last ten years – and neither has it changed in the 23 that Three Rings has been going.

We can’t promise that there won’t be another change to our pricing structure in 2034, and there may even be a change sooner than that – but we are confident that we can promise our focus and philosophy will always be the same: to make sure we’re doing the best we can for all the organisations using Three Rings, and supporting them in making a difference in the world.

The Nightline Association, the umbrella charity for Nightlines founded in 2006, has announced that it will be closing from June 30th 2025. This blog post is to reassure any and all Nightlines who are affiliated members of the Nightline Association that our commitment to always provide Three Rings for free to Nightlines remains unchanged.

If you’ve read many of our previous blog posts, you’ll know that Three Rings has a long history with Nightlines. Three Rings was founded all the way back in 2002, specifically to support the volunteers at Aberystwyth Nightline, and most of our volunteers have been Nightliners themselves – in fact, one was a Nightliner at Lancaster back in 1971: considering the first ever Nightline, Essex, only started taking calls in 1970, we’re pretty proud to say they’re still here, supporting Nightliners today!

When National Nightline, the volunteer-led umbrella body registered as the Nightline Association charity in 2006 Three Rings was already in use by the majority of Nightlines, and growing fast – the first release of the ‘Elements’ class, Milestone: Aluminium came out in July 2006. (The last of the 26 milestones in the ‘Elements’ class was Milestone: Zirconium, launched in March 2017: we’re now well into the subsequent ‘Rivers’ class, with the release of Milestone: Parrett taking place today!)

Still, as both Three Rings and the Nightline Association grew, we have stayed committed to our promise that no affiliated Nightline would have to pay for Three Rings. We regularly attended Nightline Association Conferences (and even blogged about it once!), provided technical support to the Association through enabling OpenID, and one of our earliest posts on this blog was by our Technical Lead, Dan, reminding people to never forget how great a Nightline is.

And Three Rings never forgets – because we were Nightliners once too. Almost everyone who’s been involved in building and supporting Three Rings over the past 23 years has at some point or other sat awake at 5am, listening to a student who, more than anything, just needs someone to talk to – and we’ve mostly become involved in Three Rings because we still believe in enabling others to take that call, or calls like it.

Today, Three Rings is an incredibly powerful volunteer management tool that helps power the incredible work of a massive range of charities and voluntary organisations from helplines like Nightline, Samaritans, and Childline to community shops, theatres and pubs, supporting charities providing Citizen’s Advice, services for the disabled, or vital Blood Bike services. We underpin work done at food banks and volunteer-run library services, and we helped literally thousands of volunteers at vaccination centres through our efforts to enable volunteering during the Pandemic.

We’ve come further than we ever imagined we would back in 2002. But we’ve never forgotten our roots.

The Nightline Association might be closing this June, but individual Nightlines aren’t, and Three Rings isn’t either.

And as long as Three Rings CIC continues to operate, Three Rings will always be available free to Nightlines.

Three Rings CIC is responding to the COVID-19 crisis by offering every organisation using Three Rings three free months on their subscription, and by offering Three Rings for free to any organisations and groups being set up specifically to provide community response to the challenges COVID-19.

We know that the current pandemic is making life harder for everyone – particularly for our charities and voluntary organisations who are seeing some of their best fundraising opportunities curtailed or cancelled. The last thing you want to be worrying about now is how you’re going to pay your group’s bills on top of everything else.

Three Rings is free for organisations established to support their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic

If you’ve never heard of Three Rings before – hi! We’re a not-for-profit organisation run by volunteers, and we’ve been building online rota and volunteer management software since 2002. We’ve always believed that volunteers are happiest doing something they know makes a fantastic difference – and that means nobody volunteers because they want to do the paperwork!

We already support over 500 organisations – everyone from major charities like Samaritans, Childline, and Nightline, down to local theatres, small community shops, and volunteer-led libraries.

With Three Rings we aim to streamline the administration for charities and voluntary groups. Key features of our secure, web-based system are a rota, a volunteer directory, and an internal communications system for SMS or email.

Right now we’re making Three Rings available for free to any organisation that’s been set up to provide a community response during the developing COVID-19 pandemic – whether that means a local group to get supplies to vulnerable people in isolation, a network of GP surgeries ensuring safe coverage across their catchment area, amateur dramatics groups collaborating to run workshops for home-schooled children, or anything else!

We’re not offering “reduced versions”, or limiting what your group’s copy of Three Rings can do – you’ll get the whole thing for the duration of the pandemic and social distancing response.

If you’d like to try it – or just find out more – then please get in touch with us. The whole reason Three Rings exists is because we wanted to make it easier for people to volunteer – so if you’ve just begun volunteering in response to COVID-19, let us help you to help others.

What’s Happening?

At the time of writing, the UK has been placed in lockdown to help reduce the spread and transmission of the Coronavirus SARS-COV-2, better known as COVID-19.

We know this is a time of anxiety and uncertainty for everyone, and we are also aware that a number of the organisations using Three Rings are faced with the prospect of the lockdown putting an effective end to their fundraising efforts as bucket-shaking activities, fundraising sales, and sponsored events face cancellation.

What are we doing?

Three Rings is the oldest organisation of our type, and we’ve never encountered a situation quite like this before, but even so our values make it clear how we ought to respond: we exist to help our users and to ensure that charities and voluntary organisations are given as much support as possible, and that means , and that means we want to do whatever we can to reduce the pressure and stress our users might be feeling in these uncertain times.

To that end, we are offering three months free to all our current users, starting on April 1st. If you’d normally get your next annual invoice in June 2020, you’ll now get your invoice in September 2020 (and then every September after that). If your last annual invoice was in January 2020, you won’t see another invoice from us until March 2021 (and then every March after that).

We know that some of our organisations might prefer to keep their invoice dates as they were, and not get the extra months free – that’s fine! Just contact us to let us know, and we can keep your invoice dates as they are.

Otherwise, we’ll give you the extra months free – hopefully giving a benefit to you and your volunteers, by taking some of the financial pressure off; and a benefit to our volunteers because it’ll save them some time while they adust to the situation too.

Our hope is that this response helps to ease some of the pressure and anxiety your volunteers might be feeling after the changes of the last few days.

And, on behalf of all the volunteers at Three Rings, we hope you stay safe.

Note: This post should be considered separate to, but is supplemented by our GDPR Statement.

As you’ve no doubt heard already, the EU GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulations, will be coming into force in 2018 – to be precise, on May 25th.

This blog post is designed to give you some reassurance and clarity around how the GDPR impacts Three Rings and, more particularly, your organisation.

At Three Rings, we’ve always taken personal data safety very seriously – right from the start, security has been one of our core values and we’ve taken multiple steps to ensure that our password protections are kept strong. All our traffic is encrypted to a higher standard than that required by UK online banking services, and all actions taken by users within the system are logged, and the system logs are visible to Admins to ensure there’s always an audit trail of who’s done what.

We already host Three Rings, and all data stored in it (as well as all our backups), exclusively inside the UK and European Union, and we process our data in line with our own Terms and Conditions and our Privacy Policy.

Three Rings is also designed to support organisations manage their obligations as data controllers: in fact we were talking about this in the context of the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998 as long ago as 2014 – coincidentally, at around the same time as Milestone: Promethium introduced the option for individual users to convert their accounts to be Self-Managed accounts.

Tools available to organisations to help them ensure they’re making responsible use of the data entrusted to them include our powerful Permissions system, which allows Admins to manage access to information fields in users’ Directory accounts down to the per-field basis, and reminders to Admins who are volunteering at organisations where accounts belonging to former volunteers have been Slept but not yet Purged.

Of course, the tools which Three Rings provides can’t make your organisation compliant with the GDPR – ultimately, that’s always down to your organisation and your policies – but we know that our tools can help, and will continue to help, so we wanted to make sure our users had some reassurance as we move into the final few months before the new regulations come into force.

Our new Help Pages

Over the past few months some of our volunteers have been working hard to update the Three Rings Help pages.

The old Documentation Website had got very out of date (a downside of always adding in new features!), and we know it wasn’t helping people as much as it should. It’s now been replaced by the Help Pages, available on this site.

In addition to being more up-to date, we think they’ll also be a little easier to navigate: we’ve broken down the Help so that each section of the site focuses on a particular part of the system, from the Overview, to the Admin tab – it should make it easier to drill down and get help with whatever you need.

We’re going to keep working on the Help pages, of course! If you’ve got any suggestions for how they can be improved, get in touch to let us know!

In future, we’ll be including information about each release’s New Features on the Help Pages as well, starting with Milestone: Watson. And speaking of Watson…

Why are we calling Milestone: Watson ‘Watson’?

One or two of the Three Rings users who volunteer on our test team have asked why ‘Watson’, when all the other Three Rings Milestones have been named after elements*.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an element whose name starts with W and ‘wolfram’ as the alternative name for Tungsten is already heavily associated with Wolfram Computing, so it wasn’t really suitable for a Three Rings release.

Instead, we’re opting for Watson – because all the other Milestones have been elementary.

After Watson, we’ll be back to the usual element-based names (at least for another three Milestones…): Milestone: Xenon is due in Autumn 2016.

*Milestone: Jethrik was named after a fictional element; Quintessence was the theoretical ‘fifth’ element in the Aristotelian model; G-124 was an interim release whose name was based on an isotope of Gallium.

This is the second part of a two-part blog post. The first part is here.

As we saw last week, there’s lots of reasons why a business would want to take advantage of systems like Three Rings to manage their employees: there’s a huge business need out there, and although plenty of commercial services exist to meet that need, the fact that we aim to sell to social enterprises means we deliver incredible value. But when business ask to start using Three Rings, we tell them we can’t help. Why is that?

What’s the problem with us selling to big businesses?

We began to explain last week that the biggest thing stopping us wanting to offer Three Rings to for-profit companies is that we’re a not-for-profit company, run entirely by volunteers.

Our team give up their time and their expertise to develop and support Three Rings so that our customers can reap the rewards – and we don’t have a problem with that: we want to make life easier for charities and voluntary organisations!

But we’re less keen to give our time and energy for free in order to help someone else make lots of money.

Right now, all our clients exist to help people in one way or another, and we’re happy to support them: knowing we’re helping is all the reward we need.

If we started taking on private enterprises as customers we’d be asking our volunteers to give their skills to help line someone else’s pocket, and that’s not at all fair on them (it’s especially not fair on our developers: some of them are worth quite a lot of money as freelance software engineers in their own right!).

And, of course, because Three Rings CIC is a not-for-profit company, run by volunteers, there’s a limit to how much use “more money” we need. Of course we have expenses – so do all companies! – but we work hard to keep those costs low. Partly, we do this by using the sorts of trusted, open-source technologies favoured by tech giants like Google, Amazon and Twitter. That, combined with the scalable nature of Three Rings itself means we don’t run the risk of spending customer money on expensive third-party software to keep the system going.

After our running costs are met – including the annual Christmas Card! –  any profit the company makes gets donated to charities (plus some to support the kinds of open-source technology projects that make Three Rings possible: charities are nominated by our own volunteers, and we’ll be explaining more about this process soon, too).

It would be lovely to be able to give more, but doing so doesn’t directly help either Three Rings or the organisations we support, so there isn’t a particular incentive for us to take on rich businesses as clients – especially since that would be a major conflict with our core value of being a volunteer-focused organisation in our own right!

How could we make that less of a problem?

But there is one way in which having more money could be really useful: we could offer a higher subscription charge for a ‘Commercial Edition’ of Three Rings, and use the income from that to subsidise all of our existing clients! The business would get the system they wanted, and everybody else would get Three Rings for a lower cost, safeguarding even more of their budget.

Under this system, everyone’s a winner: businesses would get to use Three Rings to help maximise their efficiency, so they’re happy. Our not-for-profit customers would have their subscriptions to Three Rings subsidised by the businesses using the system on a Commercial Edition pricing plan, so they save money, and are happy. And our volunteers would be giving their time and expertise in a way that helps businesses turn a profit, but can offset that because they know that by doing so they’re also saving our volunteer organisations money, and they’re happy too.

Although all of our team are professionals whose motivation for giving their time and skills to Three Rings is anything but making lots of money from it, it’s possible we might not mind using our volunteers’ unpaid efforts to maximise a business’s profits if we could use higher “commercial” subscription rates to subsidise the cost to our voluntary organisations – as long as the balance doesn’t shift.

And to some people, this seems like it would be a really great way to strike a balance that suits everyone: it’s pretty clearly a win-win! Only…

Why isn’t that solution good enough?

There’s a big problem with that solution. Although it looks good on the surface, the “balanced” model above would introduce a serious vulnerability: the even-lower cost to our regular not-for-profit organisations would be completely dependent on retaining Commercial Edition clients.

If we went down that route, and then a major for-profit company suddenly decided to cancel their Three Rings subscription, there’d be no “Higher business prices fund subsidies” under the Commercial Edition side of the balance. In effect, we’d be holding ourselves hostage, dependent on keeping our Commercial clients at all costs.

We’ve described our feature planning process before and, with the exception of ‘Best Tester’ features that get to jump the queue as a thank you to our volunteer test team for helping to make Three Rings better, we plan new features based on what will help the largest number of people. With a steady stream of users getting in touch to suggest new ways Three Rings could help them, that’s the best way for us to keep the system evolving in a way that’s fair to everyone.

Right now, that works fine, and everyone knows where they stand. But if we adopted that model, and then a business wanted a feature that would only help them, we’d have a problem.

All our regular customers could be clamouring for a great new feature, but what if a Commercial Edition customer demanded we introduce a complicated Purchase Order Tracking System, and threatened to drop their subscription if we didn’t?

With day jobs on top of their Three Rings work, our volunteers simply couldn’t satisfy both demands, so they’d be in a difficult position: either let down our primary user group by prioritising the commercial feature ahead of what they need, instead of working on new features that could help lots more people…or else disappoint the Commerical Edition customer, leaving them to come good on their threat and drop Three Rings entirely.

If the Commercial Edition customer did just up and leave, we’d lose the extra revenue we’d been using to subsidise our social enterprise customers. The see-saw would give a sudden lurch the other way and everybody would suddenly face an unexpected jump in their subscription rates!

Now, it’s important to remember that we’ve just described a ‘worst-case’ scenario – perhaps the hypothetical business customer would decide they could live without that feature after all – but it’s a risk we don’t feel we can take: too many people rely on Three Rings for us to be able to gamble with the quality of service we’ve committed to delivering.

So what does that mean for Three Rings?

Years ago, we looked at all those points – the positives, the negatives, the various risks and pitfalls they opened up – and we decided we had to say “no” to any big businesses that came along: the benefits weren’t worth the risk.

More than that, the benefits were barely worth the benefits: compared to other enterprise software, Three Rings offers incredible value for money as it is!

So Three Rings CIC doesn’t do business with Big Business. We aren’t here to help the corporate world make more money, and we’re not here to make lots of money ourselves.

What we’re here for is to help and support charities and social enterprises, businesses that exist to meet a social goal, not just to create profit. That’s what our volunteers are giving their time to do.

That’s why we turn major businesses away when they ask if they can start using Three Rings. Because we’re guided by our core values, using our efforts to deliver enterprise-grade software at the best prices we can offer, to bring volunteers together around the world.

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.

The next version of Three Rings, Milestone: Promethium will be going live on July the 19th, and it’s bringing with it some long-awaited changes!

As we often do, we’re going to be looking at a few of the upcoming features in depth here on the blog, and we’re going to be starting with the first one, the ability for individual users to “own” their personal Three Rings account, and to increase the security of their accounts by using two-factor authentication.

Individual Accounts

Why are you introducing Individual Accounts?

This is part of the promise we made back when Three Rings turned 10, as seen in our blog post ‘Where Do We Go From Here (Part 3)‘. That post goes into lots of detail about the reasons why we’re introducing this change, and it’s well worth a read if you want more background on where this change has come from.

For those of you in a rush, though, here’s two key diagrams from that blog post which explain what’s happening.

Before Milestone: Promethium, a fictional volunteer like Dave, who works for two different organisations, has to have one Three Rings account for his work with Finnpool Samaritans, and another, completely separate, Three Rings account for his work with Gesway Community Centre:

Once Milestone: Promethium has gone live, Dave won’t be forced to do that anymore (although he won’t have to change, either! As with any big changes we make to Three Rings, it’s up to Dave whether he wants to make this change happen or not!).

Instead, assuming Dave wants to, he’ll now be able to merge his two Three Rings accounts, and access whatever information each organisation has allowed him to access on Three Rings using a single login:

Here Dave is using just one account, with different permission levels at each organisation, depending on what roles those organisations grant him. Click to see more details.

You’ll be able to convert your Three Rings account into an Individual Account using the “My Account” link, highlighted here at the top right of the screen. Click to see a bigger version

We know this change will benefit a large number of our users – people have been asking for it since the days of Milestone: Copper! – and it’s one we’ve been working towards for some time, but the move to individual accounts doesn’t just benefit people like Dave!

What are the benefits of individual accounts?

Individual Accounts will allow volunteers like Dave to merge their accounts, so that they only need to remember one username and password. This makes it easier to be a volunteer, because they no longer have to remember multiple usernames and passwords: they only need to remember one. This disassociation between your credentials (your username and password) and your volunteering (at one or more organisations) also paves the way for us to one-day add features to do with handling applicant, trainee, and alumni volunteers – all within Three Rings.

On top of that, users who’ve changed to having an Individual Account – whether they choose to merge their accounts or not – will now be able to reset their own passwords if they forget them, taking some of the weight off their local Support People.

Finally, giving individual volunteers the option to convert their Three Rings login to an Individual Account allows us to give you the option of using Two Factor authentication.

For those interested, as far as the Data Protection Act goes – anyone with an Individual Three Rings account will now have Three Rings as their data controller for a few minor aspects of their data (their name and email address: we’ve registered as a Data Controller for these purposes!), although of course the organisation(s) with which they volunteer are likely to remain their Data Controller for the majority of the information stored about them on the system.

Introducing Two-Factor authentication

This is another change we’ve had planned for a long time! The volunteers at Three Rings have been using two-factor authentication to access their administrative tools for some time, and it’s a fairly simple, and very powerful, way to massively boost the security of an account you intend to log into.

Even if you haven’t heard of two factor authentication using those exact words, it’s likely you’ll have encounted the concept already: Google, Facebook, Twitter and eBay are among the ever-increasing number of online services which allow you to use two-factor authentication to log in, but a significant number of online banking services actively require you to use two-factor authentication to log in, either with a mini card reader or just with a small device that generates appropriate codes to validate your identity when you log in.

What is Two Factor Authentication?
Right now, everyone is using “single factor” authentication to log into Three Rings: all you prove that you’re entitled to log in with your username by demonstrating that you know “one factor” – one piece – of secret information: your password.

With two factor authentication, you need to know your password and another, frequently changed, code. This code can be generated using a free tool like Google Authenticator, or a purpose-built tool like a Yubikey. To use two factor authentication, you’ll need to convert your Three Rings account into an Individual Account (you can do this whether or not you’re a member of multiple organisations), and select which tool you want to use to generate those codes.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine you’ve set up Google Authenticator as your second factor for accessing Three Rings. Now, each time you log in with your username and password, Three Rings will also ask you for an extra code, which you’ll get from your Google Authenticator app. That code will change every 30 seconds: it might be 290 456 right now, and in half a minute, it will have changed to something else – say 271 097.

This means that even if someone manages to get hold of your password, they still can’t break into your account, because the odds that they’ll guess the correct code to get past the two factor authentication stage are incredibly small – and they only have 30 seconds to get it right!

Apart from the first time you set this up, the second factor doesn’t really make things harder for you: unlike a password you don’t need to memorise what the extra code is, because it changes all the time anyway – you just need to know where to get it from! – so you get a huge boost to the security of your account (and your organisation’s data) without having to worry about remembering extra information yourself.

For those of you who prefer non-technical explanations – imagine the Three Rings login page is a door protected by a guard. Using traditional one-factor authentication, the guard recognises your face (your username!) and will let you through as long as you show your ID badge (your password).

Under a two-factor system, the guard recognises your face (your username), notes that you’re wearing the correct ID (you typed your password correctly), but also asks you for – say – the codeword of the day, which anyone legitimately allowed to pass through the door should already know (the second factor). Only once you’ve proved you know that as well as your password will he let you in. Two factor authentication works for Three Rings the same way, but the codewords change more than than once per day!

As always, you’re under no obligation to start using two-factor authentication – but in line with our core value of security – we’d recommend that you do if you can, especially if you’re one of your organisation’s administrators.

If you’re really security-concious, you‘ll now be able to use the new “Security” button in Admin to require users with permissions to access your Admin tab to have enabled two-factor authentication before they can access Admin (just make sure you give them time to set up two-factor first or they’ll wonder where their Admin tab went!)

And speaking of administrators…

What does all this mean for organisations & administrators?

We wouldn’t be Three Rings if we weren’t dedicated to giving you the maximum degree of control over your organisation’s data and policies that we possibly can! So, although it might sound like we’re introducing seriously big changes, we’re not doing anything too radical from the perspective of organisations.

What you can’t do, is stop individual users of the system from converting their Three Rings account into an Individual Account. And you can’t stop them from using two-factor authentication if they want to add that extra layer of security to their account, although – naturally – the system won’t force anyone to start using two factor authentication, even if they convert their account to an Individual Account: they’ll have to enable it themselves. But this shouldn’t actually matter to you very much – just because a user has an Individual Account, it doesn’t mean you can’t control and restrict what they can do within your organisation.

You’ll still be able to give a role to any user, whether they have an Individual Account or not, and you’ll still be able to take roles away from them. You’ll still be able to lock a volunteer’s account, or put it to sleep when they leave your organisation. Any extra permissions a volunteer has with a different organisation will still only apply to the other organisation, not to yours (unless they legitimately gain those permissions through a role they have when volunteering with you).

You won’t be able to change their username (it’ll be their username!), but you’ll be able to ask them to do that if it should prove necessary. And you won’t be able to reset their password because they’ll be able to do it for themselves (for those organisations that have been asking us to make it possible for volunteers to conduct their own password resets and take the weight of their support people: congratulations!).

In case you’re concerned about that, by default Three Rings will be set up so that any volunteer who does reset their password will be unable to see any of your organisation’s data until you’ve revalidated their access, so not even that will change! (But if you’re not concerned, you can change that setting to make easier for volunteers who have forgotten their password, but have an Individual Account, to get stuck back in and keep helping your organisation.

The changes we’re making to volunteer accounts in Milestone: Promethium have been promised for a very long time – and we apologise for spending so long making sure we get them just right! – but now they’re here they’ll be great news for anyone using Three Rings at more than one organisation, or anyone who wants to take advantage of the huge boost in security they can achieve by enabling two-factor authentication on their Individual Three Rings Account, so we’d like to think they’ve been worth the wait!