Keeping our opportunities up-to-date

We're always concerned that the information we present to you about our volunteer opportunities is as correct as possible. We try very hard when writing the opportunity descriptions to make sure that we accurately describe what the charity really needs - we don't want you to waste your time talking to charities if they're not ready to work with you or need someone with different skills.

Similarly we don't like to think that you're chasing after charities who can't be contacted or who no longer need help. We want to offer you opportunities which are available and where the charity is ready and prepared to work with you.

Culling old opportunities

Regular browsers of the site may have noticed that some opportunities have recently disappeared from the site. We took the decision a few weeks ago to remove some of the older opportunities from the site if we hadn't had any recent contact with the charity.

This does mean that there are fewer opportunities listed but there are still over 300 available and more are added every week. Hopefully they all now have up-to-date contact information. If you still have problems getting in touch with any charity please let us know by e-mailing info@it4communities.org.uk and we'll investigate.

Talking to charities

We try to keep in touch with the charities as often as we can - we call it account management. We ask them for an update on their opportunity - whether they've heard from any volunteers, if they've started work and whether the requirement still exists. If we find that they still need help one of the options we have is to feature them in our Opportunities of the Month section.

We've been doing a lot of account management lately and so this month we've a bumper crop of Opportunities of the Month. Why not take a look?

Remember that although these opportunities may not be new additions to the site we have had recent contact with the charity. We've checked that they still need a volunteer and that they're ready to start work when they find the right person to help.

How can you help?

Although we're doing our best to keep all the opportunities on the site up-to-date we're only a small team and there are over 2,000 opportunities to monitor. We rely on the charities to let us know when they start work with a volunteer or when a piece of work is complete. Often the charity forgets to tell us.

That's where you come in. Please ask the charity you're working with to keep us up to date with progress. If we know you're working with the charity we'll remove the opportunity from the website - it saves disappointing other volunteers.

When you've finished work we want to know that too. We want to give you credit for the work you've done - perhaps the charity could nominate you for an award. In addition, and very importantly, when opportunities are complete we can add them to the figures we send to our funders. Although very boring it's these figures that ensure we get the funding we need to continue providing the whole iT4Communities service.

So please, ask the charity to tell us what's happening. And if you think they haven't, drop us an e-mail to info@it4communities.org.uk and we'll chase it up.