TORCH is a New Zealand-based project tailored to our country, our regions, and our language!
Here's a fairly plain English list of the current features in TORCH. If you have a geek or nerd amongst you, feel free to get in contact for the technical version.
- Each organisation needing volunteers can have its own webpage listing their openings.
- Organisations can also be added that want to volunteer.
- Organisations can be charities, businesses, governmental, or educational institutes.
- Volunteers can search and register themselves for any opening.
- Organisation coordinators can log in and add & edit their openings and check applications.
- There are dashboards for coordinators, volunteers, volunteer centre managers, and volunteer centre team members where all the key features or information is presented in one place for ease of management. There is an online manual with lots of screenshots personalised to the dashboard.
- People are allowed or disallowed access to a specific feature or piece of information depending on their roles (volunteers, coordinators, volunteer centre managers, and volunteer centre team members); and extra roles can be created
- Emails sent to new people who register on the website can be customised via a template, for each volunteer centre when the website is first set-up
- Words throughout the site are linked to lists of results – so you can click on a sector/skill and find all the openings related to that, or click on the age suitability and find openings for secondary school-aged for example.
- There is a contact form that emails you when someone has filled it in.
- There is a membership form that does the same.
- People can subscribe and unsubscribe to your newsletters.
- There are forms that we can set up for trainings / workshops that allow a person to register themselves, receive confirmation and email you the results too.
- Openings can be searched by availability (time), skills / sectors, city / town, & area / suburb, organisation name, or keywords.
- Permanent pages like About us can be added when your website is first created.
- Temporal pages like FAQs, and News can be added to by your volunteer centre manager when they are needed; and can also be scheduled to go on the website.
- Your team members and managers can:
- Add a new organisation
- Add a new organisation coordinator
- Add an opening (for an individual or a group)
- Add a new volunteer
- Manage applications
- Search for an organisation by assigned to, contact name or email, name, status, sectors.
- Search for volunteers (and emergency volunteers)
- Have organisations assigned to them
- Your managers can also:
- Add FAQs
- Add a new team member
- Add a board member
- Add an Insight (Resource, News, Events, etc)
- Add a newsletter link
- Export spreadsheets of volunteers, organisation coordinators, organisations etc
- Assign organisations to a team member
- Word-processing in WYSIWYG editor
- Fonts are researched that support internationalisation (including macrons)
Some of the other party and middleware services we have researched and use are:
- Send Grid (with static IP) for newsletters and all emails from your website
- Plausible for WWW analytics
There is of course room for improvement and consolidation of core features in response to need.
- Like automatically bringing in information about a charity from the Charities Register.
- Implementing geo-location search-ability.
- Facilitating membership payments and donations.