Opportunities of the Month

 

Opportunities are listed on this page because we've recently talked with the charity and we know that they are ready to work with a volunteer. Are you that volunteer?

Click on the link on the opportunity name below to go directly to the opportunity you're interested in on our website. Alternatively search the full database of available opportunities by signing-in to your account and selecting "Search for Opportunities".

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Opportunity Name: Redesign of Website including e-commerce and CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: South East
Locality: Milton Keynes
Postcode: MK12
Virtual: No

Description: This small charity provides support to stroke survivors of working age, and children. Their webmaster has just resigned due to conflicting priorities, and they are unable to update their website. They would like their website redesigned to include a new style, and incorporate new content and pictures. They also want a shop page so that they can sell Christmas cards, and other physical goods. They would like to be able to keep the website up to date after you've gone. You'll need to discuss their new content, change the structure and style of the website, advise them about image sizes, add new pages, incorporate the CMS, test the shop page, and train them how to use the CMS to update their website. Their office is accessible.

Opportunity Name: Call Logging Database
Skill Type: Advice
Region: London
Locality: Islington
Postcode: N5
Virtual: Yes

Description: This charity is looking for an advisor with experience of developing or purchasing databases for a mac environment. The charity is an independent, registered charity, which offers information about state education in England and Wales for parents of school age children. They offer free advice on a range of subjects including exclusion from school, bullying, special educational needs and school admission appeals. They have been successful in raising funds to set up a Call Logging Database for staff working on their telephone advice lines. As they use Macs (currently OS X 10.3) they have so far been unable to find an off the shelf product, and therefore would like to find a Filemaker developer to custom build something. Please can you help them to draw up a professional specification for this work and give advice about the best way to handle such a project so that they can best spend their limited resources and have an efficient system at the end of this process? Please note: they would ideally like to have the database by early April 08 but would be very happy to hear from volunteers who can help but may not be able to help immediately.

Opportunity Name: Revamp Website and Implement CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: SE1
Virtual: Yes

Description: This charity's focus is on educational and social improvement throughout Nepal. Their major project areas include teacher training, supporting the education of disadvantaged children, building adequate sanitation and water facilities, and developing the skills of Nepalese youth. They have a website which they can't update and parts of it are now out of date. They would like the website redesigned, and they have detailed ideas about this, and they also have some video footage which they would like incorporated. Of course, they want to be able to keep the website up to date, after you've gone, so you'll need to implement a CMS and train them how to use it. Their accessible office is near Southwark and Waterloo stations.

Opportunity Name: Secure Website with Database
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Brent
Postcode: NW10
Virtual: No

Description: This small young charity provides services which are designed to tackle underachievement, male vulnerability and improve the emotional health and well-being of boys, young men and fathers. Some of their work is done with boys and / or their parents in children's centres. They would like you to build a secure staff only website so that their staff in children's centres can log on securely and update a database with names and addresses of boys and parents, ethnicity, services used, feedback, etc. Staff in the office will then need to access the database via the website so that they can run ad-hoc queries, to produce reports on usage, trends, and analysis of services provided for general management purposes for reports to their funders. They'll need to be able to backup the database too. They have their own domain name and domain email. They already have hosting but it's due for renewal soon and they would your advice whether it's suitable, or else guide them in signing up for suitable hosting. They have another opportunity for an public-facing brochure-type website, so this might affect the choice of hosting. You'll need to: define the database design, maintenance forms, and reports in detail, determine the query requirements, build the database, the data entry, query and reporting web pages, train staff in its use and backup, provide usercodes and passwords for access.

Opportunity Name: Website Improvements
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Brent
Postcode: HAO
Virtual: No

Description: This lively north London community project based near Alperton tube station has a nice website created as part of a funded project, however the funding ran out. They want to be able to maintain the site themselves, so they need an easy to use CMS, and they have one or more volunteers who would like to work together with you to learn about updating the website. Their community building is accessible.

Opportunity Name: Website Review and New Pages [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: EC2Y
Virtual: No

Description: This long-established charity situated in central London helps people with criminal records obtain appropriate jobs or achieve self-employment. They want you to review their website, and create new web pages. They have a CMS already. Some of their images they've loaded on their website are huge, so they need advice on optimisation of images, why it's necessary, and how to do it.

Opportunity Name: Inspirational Young People Charity needs inspirational website
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Lewisham
Postcode: SE4
Virtual: No

Description: This charity works with young people training them to become youth workers so they in turn can provide mentoring and training support to other young people who are underachieving at school and/or experience a range of other negative life experiences. The charity provides exchange opportunities, sport, drama and arts benefiting about 300 young people a week and 1-2,000 per year. They have a very simple website giving their contact details but they would like a website that really shows the work they do and also that allows the young people to contribute their ideas and their stories. A recent project that the young people were involved in was telling their experiences of knife crime, these inspirational and insightful stories should be online. As a volunteer can you bring your knowledge of web development to the team and help them make a much improved and much more relevant website for their charity? Some work would be to involve the young people and to use their ideas/enthusiasm.

Opportunity Name: IT Strategy
Skill Type: Strategy
Region: East Midlands
Locality: Nottingham
Postcode: NG2
Virtual: No

Description: This medium size national charity based in Nottingham provides advice about breastfeeding. Their offices are accessible. They have a hotchpotch of networked computers and software, all with access to the internet. They would like someone to do an IT strategy for them. It needs to include recommendations on security, backup, and what new technologies would be useful to them. You may wish to help them implement recommendations from the IT strategy - continuity is preferred, or leave the implementation to someone else.

Opportunity Name: Guidance on educational play software purchase [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Consultancy
Region: Yorkshire & Humberside
Locality: Harrogate
Postcode: HG3
Virtual: No

Description: This north Yorkshire charity runs a playgroup primarily for children under school age. They recently bought 2 laptop computers, but still need to buy educational play software for children aged 2? to 4?. They need your advice on what to buy.

Opportunity Name: SQL Server expert required to complete half-done application
Skill Type: Database
Region: Yorkshire & Humberside
Locality: Bradford
Postcode: BD5
Virtual: No

Description: This charity works with vulnerable young people throughout Bradford. Working with youngsters of all ages they have projects to improve education, help strengthen family bonds, improve sexual health, etc. A volunteer has started to build an HR database for them but has unfortunately had to pull out. The database is supposed to allow them to record details of staff, their training requirements, holidays, attendance record, etc. The volunteer has provided the scripts to create the database structure and to set-up a couple of stored procedures. The intended database environment is SQL Server. No front-end development has been done. A volunteer with SQL server development experience is required to see if this application can be completed. The charity has suffered a number of disappointments on this project so your help would be much appreciated.