Volunteering Good Practice Guide

About the Volunteering Good Practice Guide

The Volunteering Good Practice Guide is an online information resource for organisations that involve volunteers in the work they do. Brighton and Hove Volunteer Centre and Impetus, a local charity that support and empower people of all abilities to take part in the community, produced the guide. SCIP worked to ensure that the wealth of information the guide had to offer was presented in a clear and accessible way.

The brief

Volunteering Good Practice Guide Dropdown: Easy Access to all the contentThe Volunteer Centre and Impetus wanted a site that:

• Was easy to use and accessible
• Had a contemporary and distinctive look
• Was cost effective

In addition, the site would:

• Be updated easily by people with little or no experience in editing websites
• Enable visitors to download sections of the guide

SCIP’s solution

Peter Mason, Web Design and Databases Project Manager had worked on a previous version of the website and observing the website’s changing needs, had a good idea of what the re-design would entail.

Work began between SCIP and the Volunteer Centre to establish the design by researching other website designs and functions. It was important to organise the content into bite-size pieces which would make sense to visitors, and allow them to drill down into the exact content they required.

The content could be seen as a bit dry so we wanted to liven it up with some fun graphics. The ants represent the busy, collaborative efforts that vcolunteering and community groups make to our society.

The site can be used as a book, with previous and next links for browsing through the guide. But visitors can also jump straight to the content they require.

Putting links to all the pages and content on the home page means visitors can navigate easily. The use of javascript to hide the detail initially means that they won't be overwhelmed at first.

Finally, visitors can download whole sectons of the site as PDFs. Thie is done automatically, leaving the site editors free to concentrate on their content.

Training

Volunteering Good Practice Guide PDF Creation: Automatic PDF creation from sections of the Volunteering Good Practice siteSCIP’s Web Design and Databases project worker, Mark James worked with the Volunteer Centre to create a bespoke handbook, guiding them through content management and publishing on the website. Anyone within the organisation irrespective of experience, can now use this handbook to update the website.

What the Volunteer Centre thought

“One of the many positive aspects of working with SCIP on this was that they speak a language that can be understood by non-technical people. It would have been easy to have felt intimidated by their expertise but at all points we felt that our ideas were taken on board. We felt valued as a client and appreciated the care taken to ensure that we were happy with all aspects of the work, even down to the finer details of slight variants in background colour and the size and shape of the ants’ eyes! I don’t know whose ideas the ants were but a stroke of genius and encapsulates a good message.“

Here’s what the website users thought:

“I just wanted to acknowledge the high quality work that you've accomplished with the Volunteering Guide. I found it mind bogglingly (is that a word?) thorough and well organised, easy to read and reference with a structure and design that's appealing, upbeat and user friendly.“

Cynthia Brocken, Chair, Impetus

“This type of information is very good for us as we support small community groups and they some times don't know where to go for advice. We have signposted the groups to your Volunteer Centre many times, but the website is a way to access useful information without having to travel to down town.”

Cynthia Marin Jimenez, Novas Scarman Group

“I’ve just had a quick look at your good practice website and think it’s really good. Very clear and easy to follow and I love the drop down menus with sample documents. We’re just finishing developing our website which we like but it won’t have those fancy features - we didn’t think of them.

Well done for all the hard work. I’m sure it will make volunteering much more accessible and I bet it will be a popular website.”

Paul Harvey - New Beginnings Refugee Project