Manage volunteers and share information and resources on a project-by-project basis.

Many organisations – especially within the third sector – use a network of volunteers to help them. This can range from two or three friends helping to organise a market stall, to managing hundreds of college students each contributing a few hours’ work to a new project. Whatever size the volunteer network, demands are always placed on the staff member responsible for organising and communicating vital information.

Networks of volunteers can be more effective and self-maintaining if they have access to a central information point which encourages participation and makes it supportive and easy to take part. Keeping on top of things from a central point reduces the amount of running around a staff member needs to do and frees up their time for project-related work.

• Share important documents and resources (like posters, terms and conditions, brochures etc) with all volunteers assigned to a project
• Publish “Milestones” or key responsibilities to Volumes, and everyone can see what needs to be done, by when, and who needs to do it
• Invite volunteers from a centrally-managed database to take part in a project, or let people volunteer their own time
• Communicate with everyone involved on a project through the message board, and generate conversation and interaction between the team members
• Monitor and report on volunteer activity

This application started as an in-house solution to invoicing, client and project management. Although there are loads of applications already out there, we just needed something that did what we required and didn’t overwhelm with millions of functions and options.

We intend to turn it into a public application to be released later this year.

The uncluttered interface gives you the ability to:

• Add projects with different characteristics and payment options (one-off, repeated, proportional billing, timed etc)
• Create and email PDF invoices
• Manage details for Project and Billing Contacts
• Manage client details
• Access and export invoice history
• View overdue and forthcoming and invoices, view projects that haven’t been invoiced yet

This application enables you to create projects and upload files (with add-on functionality for uploading huge files that couldn’t be sent by email) in a secure online site. You can then create and manage users so that they can access the files. You control the association between projects, files and users, and can give different permissions to users (like uploading their own files).

The application can be customised to fit behind any website, giving you a great way of compiling and sharing resources across teams.