Today, July 24th – or 24/7/12 – is Samaritans Day, recognising that Samaritans are available to callers who need them 24/7.
At Three Rings, we’re committed to supporting Samaritans and Nightlines as we streamline helpline administration, and we’ve been doing so for a pretty long time – in fact we’re the oldest continually operating rota and volunteer management system that we’re aware of! We were founded back in 2002 with a single, clear purpose: to enable helplines (in those days, just Nightline!) to run more effectively, and much, much cheaper. In fact, for the first six years of our operation, Three Rings was given away completely free, and our team not only built the system but paid out of their own pockets to keep the server running, too.
As Three Rings has grown, of course, it’s become less and less feasible for us to keep running everything for free – too many organisations are learning the benefits of the system and even though we’ve built Three Rings using trusted open-source technologies and a brilliantly scalable model, we do need to charge a small fee to keep things running for everyone.
Normally, that fee is £150 for a Samaritans branch, or £40 for any Nightline that isn’t an affiliated member of the Nightline Association (although affiliated Nightlines get Three Rings for free, and always will).
We’ve always said that we aren’t in this to make money – we’re in this because we want to help people, and we want to make sure we’re doing all we can to help the volunteers that are out there helping people.
Everyone at Three Rings is a volunteer, both for Three Rings, and for the organisations we support. We’ve sat awake at 4 in the morning, taking calls from people in their deepest moments of despair, or in the throes of anxiety, or simply in need of someone to talk to because, at 4am, they haven’t got that many choices. And we’ve got up the next morning and gone out into the rain to shake buckets and collection tins to make sure our organisations can keep going so we can be back and awake at 4am next week too.
Nobody here is in it for the money, and, as we said back in November, there’s there’s only one way we wanted to celebrate our 10th Birthday:
As we said, Three Rings was originally set up to help Nightlines, and we’ve never forgotten those roots. So, we’ve been doing some careful saving and budgeting to help ensure we can celebrate our 10th Birthday in the best possible way – by making sure we’re doing absolutely all we can to support our users.
And this offer isn’t just for current users of Three Rings – it’s for everyone! So, if you’ve been hearing about the huge difference adopting Three Rings has made for other Samaritans branches in your region, and you’d like to find our how Three Rings can help streamline your helpline administration too, there’s never been a better time.
We offer absolutely every new organisation one full calendar month’s free, no-obligation trial of Three Rings, too – so if you start a trial on the 2nd of August this year you’ll get the whole of August, then the full calendar month of September to try Three Rings for yourself, supported by our volunteers and our promise of responding to all support queries within a maximum of 24-hours – and it’s only in March (when we’re sure you’ll already be completely satisfied!) that we’d send you that invoice for £40, down from £150, to help celebrate our 10th Birthday.
If that sounds like a fair deal to you – and we hope it does – then please do get in touch!