Case study:
The Snowflake Trust
Charity online system for managing teams
www.snowflake-nightshelter.org.uk
This amazing charity runs pop-up shelters for homeless people in and around Hastings, East Sussex, throughout the winter months each year. When Snowflake Night Shelter contacted us, demand had grown yearly and the organisation was hosting overnight accommodation for almost six months of the year, at seven venues, each with three shifts, which were staffed by a handful of volunteers selected from hundreds.
Managing this growth (and the regulations involved) was placing an untenable strain on the charity’s time, resources and administrative volunteers trying to organise which volunteers would be where and when. We took the time to go through each aspect of organising this mammoth task every year, and quickly identified the bottlenecks, key issues and where we could add value.
Our solution includes a new public facing website to increase awareness and understanding of the charity’s aims, making it easier to pledge support through donations and actively encourage quality volunteers to sign up. Crucially, our solution also provides an online software system to manage the staffing across all shifts and venues throughout the operational months
Click on the centre of the image above and drag left and right to see the live website before and after the redesign.
Now, volunteers added to the system can login to see a dashboard of their upcoming shifts; automatically receive reminder notifications of shifts; edit their contact information and manage their availability (including repeating dates such as “every third Thursday of the month”) at the touch of a button.
Administrators for the charity can easily add or edit venues – including automatic links to Google Maps; add or edit lists of volunteers; track which volunteers have specialisms such as Food Handling or First Aid training; add or edit shifts for each venue; and assign volunteers to each shift, selecting from the lists of those available on the dates required (with the specialisms required) from the list automatically generated by the system.
With a single click, the dashboard enables the admin team to instantly see any upcoming shifts still in need of fulfilment and contact all available volunteers to ask who can help.
Additional features, such as full website content management and the secure distribution of Trustee documentation, meeting minutes etc, ensure that the system meets the charity’s diverse needs. Our powerful, bespoke solution will enable this incredible charity to go far into the future with a scalable and sustainable service.
