From today, Three Rings is changing its look and feel, introducing a new logo and a new strapline. The actual Three Rings application will keep working just the same as it always has, so unless you’re a particularly avid fan, or deal with your organisation’s invoices, you probably won’t see any difference. Even so, we’d like to introduce you to Three Rings’ new look, and explain why we’re changing things.
Three Rings began in 2002, as a free service provided to Nightlines. Back then, volunteers working on Three Rings gave not just their time, but their own money to keep the service going. It wasn’t until 2009 that we realised we could also use this service to help other voluntary organisations, and so it wasn’t until 2009 that we expanded the service and, as a result, established Three Rings Limited as a formal company.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2009 having an electronic rota was a daunting prospect for many organisations. Although just about everyone who got to use Three Rings praised the system for being user-friendly, the information that they’d be asked to sign up for shifts using computers often sounded like it would be complicated and challenging.
So, to combat that, we did our best to ensure strapline looked both professional and traditional, and tied it closely to the idea of traditional telephone-based emotional support through the friendly-looking “Red Telephone”:
With the strong, dark colours and transitional serif typeface, the old logo and strapline were calculated to reassure users that, while Three Rings was different, it was just there to make running their helpline easier, not change every single thing they did.
However, as Three Rings has grown, the old logo and strapline have become increasingly unsuitable. For a start, we care about a lot more than “streamlining administration”, and we always have! What we’re really here to do, what we’re giving our time to do, is to make life easy for all volunteers, whether they’re administrators or not.
And, as Three Rings has grown, we’ve developed past the stage where we only support telephone helplines. Indeed, we haven’t just supported telephone helplines since 2010, when the wonderful volunteers behind Maytree Respite Centre came on board (after waiting, very patiently, for more than a year!)
These days, Three Rings supports our “traditional” base of volunteers at Nightlines and Samaritans alongside community centres, village stores and volunteer-supported and community-run libraries, both in the UK and abroad. Since many of these organisations don’t rely on a telephone to achieve their goals, using one as our logo makes us seem like we might not be the right system for them. But, in many cases, we are the right system for them: Three Rings is flexible for a reason, and that reason is so we can help as many people as we possibly can.
Sometimes, we get wonderful voluntary organisations – just the sort of people who could benefit from Three Rings asking “We’re not a helpline – are we allowed to use Three Rings?”, and while it’s wonderful that they asked (so we can say “Yes!”), it makes us worry that there might be people out there who get put off by the phone, anddon’t ask, leaving them to use a volunteer management system that’s not the best match for them.
That’s why we’re changing the logo and strapline: a small-scale “rebranding” exercise that will help us reflect not only our own, open and honest style of operation but which should make it clear that we’re there for any nonprofit organisation that could benefit from a powerful and affordable volunteer management system.
The old logo implied a serious and traditional focus on the management of helplines specifically, but the new logo and strapline better reflect Three Rings‘ core aim of making it easier for volunteers to get on with volunteering:
The logo and strapline were designed for us on a pro bono basis by the very talented Philip English – in exchange, we’ve promised to describe what it was like working with him in a separate post, which you’ll see here shortly.
We’ve also taken the opportunity to redesign the company website (which hadn’t really changed since 2009 and was looking pretty dated and tired!) New sections of the site you might be interested in include a whole new page clearly setting out our corporate values, updated information on the various features and tools Three Rings can offer you and, for the first time, photos and short biographies of all of the volunteers who make Three Rings happen – so you’ll at least have some idea of who you’re talking to if you contact us for support!