Volbase Business Solutions

Managing Data

Volbase is an information management system designed to hold many different types of information, including: people and organisations, case work and meetings activities, and resources, such as library items.

Duplication and information islands are avoided by keeping all the data in one place, with all your users connecting to the same data store. This increases efficiency and addresses data protection issues.

Information can be organised into lists and grouped together, for example lists of people can be used as mailing lists, or a set of activities can be grouped together for a particular project.

Volbase does not require expertise in order to search, sort or filter by different columns, or add or remove data columns to create a 'view' for different tasks. This can be saved so that a convenient view of the data is readily available.

Forums and Networks

A key requirement for many organisations is to group a selection of contacts in the main list into a smaller list. This may be for creating thematic forums and networks, directories or simply segmenting clients into different groups. Users and teams can set up and manage as many lists as required.

The following can be carried out with any or all of selected lists:

• Set permissions on a list for specified users, thereby controlling who can access, assign members to, or remove members from a list.
• Create a set of user defined status values for a list, thereby setting the status of the list members.
• Web-enable a list to allow clients to selectively participate in your networks and forums. Membership can be moderated if required.
• Deliver the contents of a list as a standard internet RSS or Atom feed. For example, an online directory of organisations can be pulled into a website.

Membership Management

Membership organisations can create a list or use the main list for managing membership. Using status management enables the tracking of renewals and new members, setting the status according to the preferred membership process. Membership categories and renewal dates can be set automatically.

Key features:

• Define a business workflow to model membership and renewals processes.
• Apply the process to any number of lists, allowing as many memberships as required for different purposes.
• Record the membership fees paid
• Automatically flag records when a membership is due for renewal.
• Have an anniversary or static renewal date.

Events and Training Courses

Volbase manages training course and events, allowing as many participants as required. By setting defined values, the status of participants at an event can be managed as well as the booking process (from enquiry all the way through to attendance). Control the sending of invoices, joining instructions and printing of course certificates.

• Manage the status of participants showing where they are in the booking process.
• Set the type of attendee for an event using specific configured values, such as speaker, trainer, participant, exhibitor etc.
• Control the printing or emailing of documents such as instructions, certificates.
• Classify training courses delivered or brokered and manage participation.

Activities and Monitoring

In Volbase one can define and create records for many types of activity in order to model and record an organisation’s interactions with clients or service users. Any number of contacts can be associated with any activity record.

There are several broad types of activity: Meeting (including training courses and events discussed above); Communications (telephone, mail and email), Tasks (for tracking client case work, help desk activity and other types of work). New activity types can be created to reflect an organisation’s own services.

Activities can be kept as a way of documenting soft outputs. In addition, an activity can be classified to record when a hard output is delivered, or document outcomes. Analysis tools facilitate the aggregation of data in order to provide monitoring reports, thus, providing effective evaluation for funders and stakeholders.

• Record any activity and associate it with any number of beneficiary contacts.
• View a 'CRM' history of activities with a specific beneficiary contact or organisation.
• Classify activities to record outcomes and other useful data.
• Produce aggregate reports of activities for a defined period of time. Correlate outputs with the profile data of beneficiaries, to produce a meaningful analysis of service delivery based on geography, ethnicity, gender, age and disability.

Profiling and Surveys

Whilst Volbase has many common data fields for stored records, every user organisation has their own specific data requirements. These requirements can be satisfied by generating datasets to profile or classify people, organisations, activities and resources.

Volbase will automatically create data input forms, printed forms and website forms based on defined datasets, facilitating data collection.

• Define a dataset (database table) and associate it with any type of record on Volbase
• Set data types and use lookup lists to help control data quality by restricting fields to one or more predefined values.
• Volbase automatically creates and maintains data entry forms based on defined datasets, both in the application’s user interface and on the web.

Office Integration

Administrative and communications efficiency is increased by using mail merge, bulk email merge and export to excel, HTML or XML.

Document templates can be saved for easy reuse for common standard letters and emails.

• Export a view to an excel spreadsheet
• Use a Volbase standard merge field in either a word document, or an email to deliver customised content to your clients and contacts.
• Work with Office 2003 to Office 2010 and ensure your database system keeps up with the next version of office.
• Deliver customised bulk email with merge fields placed in the email body or in a word attachment.

Website Integration

Any information stored in Volbase can be rendered onto a web site by selectively exposing any set of records required. Additionally, by making the web site interactive, clients can enter and amend their data, such as profiling and mapping forms, networks and events. Information so collected is returned to the database and kept safely on the organisation’s own network.

• Update records, synchronise and have website content updated in minutes.
• Deliver standard RSS feeds to the website to display on-line directories and search features.
• Allow clients to update their profile data on-line and encourage this by sending bulk email with automated URLs which will log recipients into the portal. Data collected online is automatically synchronised with the Volbase database on the organisation’s own network.
• Brand the portal with organisation’s logo and text.