Volbase Business Solutions

Database Solutions for the 3rd Sector

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What Volbase does

If you are an organisation or group and you need to keep track of lots of individual contacts or contacts within other organisations then Volbase will solve many of your business problems.

Do you?:

  • provide a range of services to client groups and individuals
  • maintain theme or project based networks of contacts
  • need to communicate frequently by letter, email, phone with many contacts
  • need to remember to follow lots of things up
  • do research and profiling of clients groups
  • track the work you are doing with different clients
  • summarise and report your outputs to sponsors and other stakeholders
  • have a need to share records with other trusted agencies
  • have members and manage renewal processes
  • work on several sites
  • rely too much on what staff know "in their heads"
  • store the same information several times for different purposes

If so, Volbase will solve many of the problems you encounter.

Volbase is the software tool of choice for many types of service organisations where client management is your emphasis. Volbase is particularly suited to groups working in the voluntary sector and infrastructure bodies such as CVS, Voluntary Action, Rural Community Councils and other capacity building agencies.

Volbase provides users with a unified information management environment. You can implement most of the listed business solutions within this environment at no extra costs and without software development. The modules are all included. Solutions are configured to suit your particular requirements and processes incrementally and at your own pace to suite your capacity for change. 3rdbase Ltd has significant experience in the sector and our involvement in your projects can add significant value.

Unlike competitor solutions, there are no huge annual recurring costs for the software. You own the licence and the business solutions. An optional low cost annual maintenance and support contract, with free software upgrades, and helpdesk support, enable you to get on with the job of supporting your client groups.

Unified Records Management

Managing all your records for organisations, contacts, and resources in one place, avoiding duplication and information islands thereby increasing efficiency and addressing data protection requirements.

Volbase presents your information in well organised lists resembling files in folders or emails in Outlook. It is easy for you to sort or filter by different columns and add or remove columns from your view for different tasks without being an expert database users.

Use the Volbase search engine for locating records by keywords too.

Community Networks

Cluster organisations and contacts to manage themed networks, mailing lists, forums and directories. Users and teams can set up and manage such clusters. Networks can be web enabled allowing front line organisations to participate.

Mapping & Research

Generate your own questionnaires to gather profile data, or any other research or mapping data such as PQASSO attainment levels. Questionnaires can be printed or rendered on websites. Manage the data collection using a defined business process to help you capture all the information you need, including hard to reach groups and target organisations to satisfy your equality targets.

Events Management

Manage events effectively, using a business process to capture new bookings and track status of participants all the way through to whether they attended or not.

Training Course Management

Create and classify training courses you deliver or broker. Manage participation as an event, and record evaluation and outcome data.

Membership Management

Manage your membership or affiliates efficiently. Track renewals and new members through your board approval process and set membership categories and renewal dates automatically.

Monitoring

Develop monitoring tools allowing you to record hard outputs for all your services, and pursue these to measure outcomes. Evaluate effectively for your funders and stakeholders producing aggregated reports.

Office Integration

Increase your administrative and communications efficiency by using mail merge, email merge and reports. You can select any cluster of records or use powerful search engine features to target certain sub-sectors within the VCS.

Activities

Record your interactions with your beneficiaries, by documenting ‘soft’ outputs. These can be telephone calls, meetings, faxes, as well as emails and letters sent and received.

Volunteering Management

Profile and record outputs and outcomes for volunteers using a volunteer service. Manage your volunteer client using a defined business process to build in a quality system.

Volunteering Opportunity Management

Record and classify volunteering opportunities offered by the sector. Search for opportunities that match a volunteer’s requirements or vice versa. Keep a history of referrals to opportunities allowing you to monitor the organisations that benefit.

Library And Resources

Create a library allowing you to classify your resources available to the VCS. Track loan episodes to monitor who is using your resources.

Grants Management

Manage a small grants project using a business process to track applications, awards made, outputs and outcomes.

Service Desk Management

Set up a help-desk solution and record enquiries and support requests and information delivered to the public or the VCS.

Knowledge Management

View a historical record of all the above for any individual or organisation to give you a unique ‘customer’ focus. Retain this knowledge for the long-term benefit of your CVS, and your beneficiaries.

Website Integration

Selectively expose any set of records on your website. These can be anything from your library, on line VCS directories, training courses or networks. Any information you store on Volbase can be rendered on your web site. You can even make your web site interactive, so that the VCS can enter and amend their data, such as community mapping forms, networks and events. Information so collected is returned to the database on your company network for verification.

Distributed Database

Using our ‘datahub’ technology you can share your information across multiple sites using your internet connection, without expensive hardware solutions, allowing the electronic sharing of information between teams based in different offices across the CVS district.

Mobile Database

The distributed database solution also extends to standalone users, so that outreach workers, or people working from home, can have a full copy of your data on a laptop.

Data Sharing

Using our ‘sharehub’ technology you can selectively share information with other agencies such as a sub-regional consortium of CVS or even regional hubs allowing collaborative and co-ordinated service delivery.



3rdbase Ltd – January 2009